Police officer misuse of Flock camera prompts new safeguards

Our Take

CBS 8 San Diego's report, credit to their newsroom for digging into this, confirms what we've been saying all along: give cops a nationwide license plate tracking network and some of them will use it to stalk exes, snoop on neighbors, or settle personal grudges. Flock's response is to roll out "new safeguards" — audit trails, usage flags, maybe some stricter login requirements. That's a PR move dressed up as accountability.

Here's the problem with safeguards bolted on after the fact: they only catch misuse that gets investigated, reported, and confirmed. For every officer caught, how many quietly search an ex-partner's plate and never get flagged? Audit logs are useless if nobody's looking at them, and departments have shown little appetite for proactively policing their own access to this data. The real safeguard would be not building a surveillance dragnet that makes this kind of abuse possible in the first place.

This is exactly why transparency and pushback matter more than vendor promises. Check our camera map to see if Flock has planted readers in your town, and if you want to push back on this infrastructure before the next misuse scandal breaks, head to our take-action page for ways to get involved locally.