Police officer resigned after being confronted over personal use of surveillance

Our Take

KRIS 6 News broke a story that should sound familiar to anyone who's followed Flock Safety's rollout across small-town America: a detective in Kingsville, Texas resigned the very day his department sat him down about using the city's license plate readers for personal reasons. No independent audit caught this — it took internal confrontation, and we don't even get full clarity on what he was looking up or who he was tracking before he walked.

This is the pattern critics have warned about since day one. Flock markets these camera networks as crime-fighting tools, but the access logs are only as good as the agency's willingness to actually review them. A resignation isn't accountability — it's an exit that lets the department quietly close the book without public disclosure of searches run, people surveilled, or whether any of it violated someone's rights. Departments love to tout ALPR 'hit' stats; they're far less eager to publish misuse audits.

Every one of these cameras sits on a pole somewhere in your town, logging plates whether or not anyone's committed a crime. Check our camera map to see what's watching your commute, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your local council for real audit transparency instead of after-the-fact resignations.