Documents: Kingsville officer used Flock cameras for thousands of personal searches

Our Take

KIII 3 News out of Corpus Christi just handed us another case study in why 'trust us, it's audited' doesn't cut it. A former Kingsville officer is accused of running about 5,300 personal license plate searches through Flock's system — not for active investigations, but apparently for his own reasons. That's not a glitch. That's a feature of a surveillance tool that logs every plate, every time, everywhere, and hands that data to whoever has login access.

Flock and police departments love to tout 'audit trails' as the safeguard that makes mass plate tracking acceptable. But an audit trail only matters if someone actually reads it before 5,300 searches pile up. These systems run on the assumption that officers will police themselves. Kingsville is proof that assumption fails, and it probably isn't the only place it's failing quietly right now.

Every camera added to this network is another data point ready for misuse, whether it's an ex tracking a former partner's movements or an officer settling a personal grudge. Check our camera map to see what's watching your town, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment before your local department makes headlines for the same reason.