A police officer used a license plate reader 40 times—not to catch criminals

Our Take

Credit to Wallet Sum: Simple Finance for digging into something we harp on constantly — the gap between what Flock Safety and its peers promise ('solving crime') and what actually happens once 120,000-plus cameras start feeding a searchable database. A case where an officer allegedly ran plate lookups dozens of times with no case number attached isn't a hypothetical civil-liberties worry. It's the predictable outcome of building a nationwide tracking grid and then asking departments to police their own access logs.

This is the part vendors don't put in the sales pitch: audit trails exist, but they only matter if someone actually reviews them, and consequences only happen if agencies choose to enforce their own policies. Forty queries with no stated purpose should trigger alarms immediately, not surface later in an investigation or a records request. When it doesn't, that's not a rogue cop problem — it's a design problem, because the system was built to make mass querying effortless and accountability optional.

If you want to see how saturated your own neighborhood already is, check our camera map, and if this kind of story bothers you, don't just get mad — push your city council for audit transparency and query limits. Our take-action page has the playbook.