Cop used Flock camera to track women's license Plate

Our Take

Credit to the You and The Law Podcast for surfacing this clip, because it's the kind of admission we rarely get on the record: an officer saying, plainly, that he ran a license plate reader on a woman without any criminal predicate. That's not a hypothetical slippery-slope scenario civil liberties groups warn about — that's a law enforcement officer describing exactly how these tools get misused in practice, in his own words.

Flock Safety and its police partners constantly tell the public that ALPR networks are for solving crimes, not for personal fishing expeditions or tracking people who've done nothing wrong. But the audit trail is only as good as the agency's willingness to actually review it, and most departments don't publish regular audits or discipline records for this kind of misuse. When an officer can casually pull plate history on someone without a case number, a warrant, or even reasonable suspicion, the technology isn't a crime-solving tool anymore — it's a surveillance tool pointed at whoever the officer decides deserves it, for whatever reason he decides.

This is exactly why we track camera locations and push for transparency and accountability at the local level. If there's a Flock camera near you, check our map to see what's watching your neighborhood, and head to take action for ways to push your city council and police department for real oversight before incidents like this become the norm instead of the exception.