Flock Camera Misuse: 69 Officers Accused of Running Plates for Themselves — WAKE · 2026-08-20

Our Take

Vic From The 904 walks through the Washington Post's August 19 report, and the number that jumps out is 69: police officials accused of, charged with, or convicted of misusing license plate reader data — with at least 15 cases tied to stalking exes, monitoring family members, or running plates for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety. This is the story we've been warning about since Flock's network started blanketing neighborhoods with cameras nobody voted for. The audit trail is the only thing standing between 'crime-fighting tool' and 'personal surveillance system,' and reporters only found these cases because a fraction of the logs were public through records requests.

Think about what that means. Roughly 7,000 agencies are plugged into this network, each one theoretically capable of producing the same kind of log the Post used to catch these officers. Most departments never get audited by a newsroom. Most residents have no idea their plate has been searched, by whom, or why — because 'reason given' is often just a dropdown menu an officer fills in themselves, with little independent verification. When the system trusts the searcher to self-report their own justification, you get exactly what happened here: cops running plates on love interests, neighbors, and people who cut them off in traffic, hundreds or thousands of times, with no one watching until a reporter went digging.

This is why we keep pushing people to find out if Flock cameras are already watching their own street — check our map to see what's nearby — and then push their city council for real audit requirements, public logs, and consequences for misuse before it becomes a pattern instead of a headline. Credit to Vic From The 904 for laying out the Post's findings clearly; if your town hasn't asked who's watching the watchers, our take-action page is a good place to start.