He Searched Her License Plate 2,055 Times — Flock Didn’t Stop Him

Our Take

Business Reform's reporting on former Jackson County, Indiana deputy Skylar Thompson is the kind of story Flock Safety doesn't want going viral, because it guts the company's favorite talking point: that every search is logged, justified, and auditable. Thompson allegedly ran the same woman's plate over 2,000 times, tagging the searches "City Planning / Traffic Analysis" — a reason that had nothing to do with his actual job. If prosecutors are right, that's not a system with guardrails. That's a system with a comment box that nobody reads until a victim or a whistleblower forces the issue.

This is the core problem with ALPR "audit trails" as currently designed. The officer picks his own justification from a dropdown, nobody cross-checks it against his actual assignment in real time, and the data sits there until a scandal breaks or a records request gets filed. Flock markets these audits as accountability. In practice they're a paper trail that only matters after the damage — in this case, alleged stalking of a private citizen using a taxpayer-funded surveillance network — is already done. Multiply one bad actor by the thousands of agencies running Flock nationwide and ask yourself how many more Thompsons are sitting in patrol cars right now, uninvestigated, simply because nobody's pulled the log.

Cases like this are exactly why we built our camera map — so people can see where this infrastructure exists in their own communities before it's misused against them. If your city or county runs Flock, push for mandatory real-time audit reviews, not just retroactive ones, and check our take-action page for how to get involved locally.