Christian Eder Ex Amarillo Cop Charged With 78 Counts Over Flock Cameras

Our Take

Credit to OhDangReally for digging into this one, because it's the case Flock Safety doesn't want you to think about. A former Amarillo police officer allegedly used his access to Flock's ALPR network to stalk a romantic rival, running the guy's plate 76 times and typing "city planning" into the justification field like that would hold up. It didn't. The audit trail that caught him is the same audit trail Flock loves to point to as proof their system is accountable. Fine — it caught one guy, after the fact, after real harm was already done.

That's the part that should bother you. Flock markets these cameras as a public safety tool, but what they actually are is a surveillance database sitting in front of anyone with a badge and a login. The "audit log" only works if someone is actually reviewing it, and in most departments nobody is, until a victim complains or a reporter starts asking questions. This case didn't come from proactive oversight. It came from an ex-cop getting caught stalking somebody and prosecutors reconstructing the pattern after the fact. That's not accountability, that's a paper trail for a crime that already happened.

Every one of these stories is a reminder that the danger isn't hypothetical — it's the person sitting at the terminal. Check our map to see if your town is already feeding plate data into this system, and if it is, head to take action to find out how to push back before your local department has its own "city planning" story.