Officers Resign After Using Flock Cameras To Stalk Women

Our Take

Respectsyoutech's reporting lands on the exact fear we've been raising since day one: a nationwide network of license plate cameras is only as trustworthy as the thousands of individual humans who can query it. The video walks through officers, including one in Milwaukee, who resigned after using Flock Safety's system to track women they'd dated. Fourteen logged abuse cases and counting isn't a glitch, it's a pattern. When the access logs are the only thing standing between 'public safety tool' and 'stalking device,' you've built a surveillance system, not a safety system.

The detail that should stick with you is the woman who only found out she'd been tracked by checking a public database, not because any department proactively disclosed it. That's the whole problem with ALPR networks in a nutshell: audits happen after the harm, if they happen at all, and the burden falls on victims to go digging for proof. Agencies love to tout 'strict access controls' in their marketing, but resignations in lieu of prosecution tell you how seriously those controls get enforced when an officer is the one breaking the rules.

This is why we keep pushing people to check what's watching their own neighborhood, not just trust the press releases. Pull up our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you want to push back on unchecked deployments in your area, our take-action page has concrete next steps. Credit to Respectsyoutech for surfacing these cases, this is exactly the kind of accountability reporting mass surveillance infrastructure depends on us not doing.