Five IMPD officers are now charged with misusing Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to FOX59 News for breaking this one open: five Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers are now facing criminal charges for misusing Flock Safety camera access, with officer Jonathan Schultz alone hit with two stalking counts. This is exactly the nightmare scenario privacy advocates have been warning about since these networks started blanketing American roads — not a hypothetical, but five badges deep in an alleged abuse ring built on a surveillance tool sold to taxpayers as a crime-fighting silver bullet.

Flock and the police departments that deploy its cameras love to talk about audit logs and 'access controls' like they're an ironclad defense against misuse. But audit logs only catch abuse after the fact, after someone has already been tracked, stalked, or targeted using a government-grade location database. IMPD is a big, well-resourced department, and if officers there could allegedly turn ALPR data into a stalking toolkit, that should terrify anyone who assumes smaller agencies with less oversight are doing better.

This case is a reminder that every one of these cameras is a point of failure — technical, legal, and human. If you want to know how many are already watching your streets, check our camera map, and if your town is considering a Flock contract or renewal, now's the time to push back using our take-action resources before your local department becomes the next headline.