Police Lietenant Found Misusing Flock Cameras

Our Take

Credit to The Cyber Security Admin for surfacing yet another case of an officer allegedly using Flock Safety's license plate reader network for something other than its advertised purpose. We don't have the underlying documents in front of us, so we won't speculate on the specifics, but the pattern itself is the story: every few months another department finds itself explaining why an employee with a badge and a login treated a surveillance dragnet like a personal lookup tool.

This is exactly the failure mode critics warned about when these camera networks started going up in neighborhoods with zero public debate. Flock markets itself as a tool for solving crimes, but the access logs are only as good as the audits nobody is required to run. When misuse does get caught, it's usually because of a lawsuit, a nosy reporter, or an ex-partner filing a complaint — not because the system has real built-in accountability. If a lieutenant can allegedly misuse the network, so can anyone else with credentials, and most departments aren't publishing the audit numbers that would tell us how often it happens.

If you want to know whether your own block is being logged by one of these cameras, check our map, and if you'd rather your city not hand out this kind of access in the first place, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the next misuse story breaks.