Former Michigan City cop, Joliet officers under investigation for Flock camera misuse

Our Take

CBS Chicago is reporting something we've been warning about since day one: the people with access to Flock Safety's license plate readers don't always use that access for legitimate police work. Investigations into officers in Michigan City and Joliet for alleged misuse of the system aren't an isolated glitch — they're the predictable result of handing cops a searchable, real-time log of everyone's movements with minimal independent oversight. Credit to CBS Chicago for digging into this story instead of letting it slide as a local personnel matter.

Flock and police departments love to sell these networks as tools for catching violent offenders and recovering stolen cars. What gets buried in the press releases is the audit trail problem: when an officer can query a database of millions of plate scans for personal reasons — tracking an ex, a neighbor, a rival — the only thing standing between that and total abuse is internal policy and the hope that someone eventually notices. These two departments didn't catch this because the system is self-policing; they caught it because something or someone flagged it after the fact, which means we have no idea how often it doesn't get flagged at all.

This is exactly why transparency and public accountability can't be optional add-ons to ALPR deployments — they have to be the baseline before a single camera goes up. If you want to see how dense this surveillance net already is in your own community, check our camera map, and if you'd rather push back than just watch it grow, our take-action page has concrete steps for pressuring local officials on oversight and audit requirements.