Florida Removes Flock Surveillance Cameras After Alleged Tracking Abuse

Our Take

The Text Proof lays out a case that should be read as a warning label for every Flock Safety install in the country. A Kentucky officer, Asad Zahir, allegedly ran over 2,000 queries on a nationwide ALPR network to track the mother of his child — including 241 searches logged after a court ordered him to stay away from her. That's not a hacked system or a rogue contractor. That's the platform working exactly as designed, just pointed at the wrong target. Florida's response, ordering every roadside reader off state highways within 30 days, is the kind of blunt correction you get when 'officer safety tool' quietly becomes 'stalker's GPS.'

What makes this story matter beyond one bad cop is the audit trail problem it exposes. These networks log who searched what, but logging isn't oversight — it's just evidence collected after the harm is already done. Zahir's searches were reportedly visible the whole time; nobody was watching until it was too late. Multiply that by the thousands of agencies with access to shared Flock data, and you have a surveillance system where abuse is discoverable only in hindsight, if at all.

Florida pulling cameras is a rare instance of a state actually reversing course instead of expanding the network. Whether that holds, or whether it's a 30-day headline fix, remains to be seen. Check our camera map to see what's still running near you, and hit take action if your town hasn't had this conversation yet. Credit to The Text Proof for surfacing the court records behind this.