WHOA. OFFICER USED FLOCK TO STALK HIS EX City council hears how Flock ALPR was abused — stalking an

Our Take

This is the nightmare scenario that gets waved away every time a city council approves a Flock Safety contract: give cops a button that tracks every car's movements, and sooner or later someone will push it for personal reasons instead of public safety. According to the reporting highlighted in this video from the channel WHOA, that's allegedly exactly what happened — an officer using the ALPR network to keep tabs on an ex. Credit to WHOA for getting this in front of a city council and on camera, because these stories almost never surface unless someone forces the issue in a public meeting.

Flock and police departments love to talk about 'audit trails' and 'policy safeguards,' but an audit log only matters if someone is actually reviewing it, and a policy only matters if it has teeth. Too often the answer is a quiet reassignment, a slap on the wrist, or nothing at all. When the tool exists, the misuse is not a hypothetical risk — it's a matter of time, and the people most likely to be targeted are exes, activists, journalists, and anyone an officer with access decides to look up.

This is why we keep pushing for public, searchable audit logs, independent oversight, and hard limits on who can query these networks and why. If there's a Flock camera near you, check our camera map to see what's already watching your block, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your own city, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up at the next council meeting before it's your data being misused.