Flock Wave! Massachusetts Camera Scandal 4 Officers Caught In 3 Weeks

Our Take

Credit to OhDangReally for stitching together what looks like a coincidence but isn't: New Bedford, Lynn, and Stow all had officers caught abusing license plate reader access within the same three-week window. New Bedford's city council meeting reportedly dissolved into shouting before the whole network got suspended. That's not a glitch in the system working — that's a community realizing the system was never really watching the watchers until it was too late.

The Lynn case is the one that should keep you up at night. Those two officers weren't caught by a supervisor, an internal affairs unit, or a policy audit — they were flagged by Flock's own software. That means the only reason we know about this abuse is because the vendor's algorithm happened to notice. How many searches never trip that wire? How many departments don't even have the audit tool turned on, or don't bother reading the reports when they do? And then there's Stow, where a detective allegedly ran plates on a woman who'd legally changed her identity to escape danger — not for any case, just because he could look. That's the entire danger of this technology in one sentence: the ability to find anyone, anytime, for any reason, with no crime required.

Three departments, four officers, one state, three weeks — and that's just what surfaced publicly. Multiply that across the thousands of agencies running these networks nationwide and ask yourself how much of this never makes the news. If you want to see how dense this surveillance grid has gotten near you, check our camera map, and if your town is still debating whether to install or renew a Flock contract, get the tools to push back at take action.