Milwaukee Cop ABUSES Flock Surveillance Cameras to Stalk His Ex: Carpenter vs United States (2018)

Our Take

Hard Lens Media's report on a Milwaukee officer allegedly using Flock Safety's camera network to track an ex-partner is the nightmare scenario every ALPR critic has been warning about for years. These systems are sold to city councils as tools for catching car thieves and violent felons, but once that database exists, it's only as trustworthy as the person with the login. Give any officer unsupervised query access to a statewide web of license plate scans and you've built a ready-made stalking tool, badge or no badge.

This is exactly why Carpenter v. United States matters here. The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the government generally needs a warrant to access someone's historical cell-site location data because that kind of persistent tracking reveals the 'privacies of life.' Flock's camera grid does something strikingly similar, just with license plates instead of cell towers, and mostly without the audit trails, judicial oversight, or public reporting that might catch abuse before it ruins someone's life. Credit to Hard Lens Media for connecting a real-world misuse case to the legal theory that should be constraining it.

Cases like this rarely surface because the agencies running these networks don't like publicizing their own failures. If you want to know how many of these cameras are watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for the next abuse story to break, our take-action page has steps for pushing your local government toward real oversight.