Chicago-area officers accused of misusing Flock technology in 2 cases

Our Take

Credit to ABC 7 Chicago for digging into what Flock Safety and most police departments would rather you not think about too hard: the people with access to these camera networks are just people, and some of them will misuse that access. An Itasca officer losing their job and a former Kenosha County deputy facing criminal charges isn't some hypothetical slippery-slope scenario anymore — it's the documented, real-world outcome of giving law enforcement a searchable database of everyone's movements with minimal independent oversight.

Flock and its police partners love to talk about audit logs and 'misuse detection,' but audit logs only matter if someone is actually reading them before the damage is done, and consequences only matter if agencies are willing to admit fault publicly instead of quietly reassigning an officer. These two Chicago-area cases didn't surface because the system caught itself working as designed — they surfaced because journalists and, presumably, victims pushed back. That's the opposite of a system you should trust to run on autopilot across thousands of intersections nationwide.

Every one of these stories is a reminder that ALPR networks aren't just a tool for solving crimes — they're also a tool that can be turned against exes, neighbors, journalists, or anyone an officer has a personal grudge against. If there's a Flock camera reading plates near you, you can check our camera map, and if you want to push back on your local department's policies, our take-action page has a starting point.