Police Say Officer Used Flock 31 Times to Track Boyfriend’s Ex

Our Take

Thin Blue Lies lays out a story we keep seeing in different towns with different names: an officer with a badge and a login turns a license-plate-reader network into a personal tracking device. Twenty-nine of the alleged searches were logged as routine motor vehicle checks, two as burglary or robbery investigations — paperwork cover for what police themselves say was a woman using government infrastructure to stalk her boyfriend's ex-wife. That's not a hypothetical 'what if someone misuses this system' — that's the system working exactly as designed, just pointed at the wrong target.

Flock and similar ALPR networks are sold to city councils as crime-fighting tools, but the audit trail only matters if someone actually checks it and acts on what they find. Here, the chief says it took dozens of queries before anyone caught on, and even then the officer reportedly stayed on payroll during the fallout. If internal accountability moves that slowly inside a department watching its own, imagine how little recourse an ordinary resident has when their movements get logged by a camera they never voted for and can't audit themselves.

This is why we push people to find out what's watching their own streets instead of waiting for a scandal to surface. Check our camera map to see if Flock or similar ALPR hardware is already logging plates near you, and head to our take-action page for templates to push your city council on audit policies, access logs, and real consequences for misuse — not just a press conference after the fact. Credit to Thin Blue Lies for digging into the Mooresville case and keeping the pressure on departments that would rather this stayed quiet.