Joe Rogan on Flock Cameras: Cops ABUSED Them to Stalk Exes
The short version: Joe Rogan's viral take on cops misusing Flock cameras to track exes echoes what ALPR watchdogs have warned about for years: these networks are only as trustworthy as the officers who can query them.
Our Take
When a clip of Joe Rogan talking about cops abusing Flock cameras racks up this kind of attention, via Our Community Media's upload, it's worth pausing on why the story resonates. This isn't a new revelation to anyone who's followed ALPR deployments closely. Documented cases of officers running plates for personal reasons — exes, rivals, people they're dating, coworkers they don't like — have surfaced in department audits and lawsuits across the country for years. What's new is that a mainstream audience is hearing it from a non-surveillance-beat source, which tends to get the conversation moving faster than another policy report ever could.
The underlying problem isn't really about one bad cop or one lawsuit. It's structural: a nationwide network of automated cameras logging everyone's movements, searchable by thousands of officers, with audit trails that often depend on self-reporting and rarely get proactively reviewed. Flock markets itself on crime-solving stats, but the flip side is that the same system built to find a stolen car is just as capable of letting someone track a spouse, a journalist, or a protester. Lawsuits are a symptom of that design, not a bug being patched out.
If you want to see how dense this surveillance net already is in your own area, check out our camera map. And if this story makes you want to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting answers from your city council or police department before the next misuse story breaks closer to home.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Our Community Media, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.