Flock Safety ALPR Abused by Officers in Milwaukee and McHenry County

Our Take

The channel Flock Off just put a name and a place to something we've been saying for a while: ALPR abuse isn't a slippery-slope hypothetical, it's a documented pattern. Their new video walks through cases out of Milwaukee and McHenry County where officers appear to have used Flock Safety's network for reasons that have nothing to do with solving the crime it was supposedly installed to stop. Once a camera network exists, the temptation to use it as a personal lookup tool for exes, neighbors, or grudges is not an edge case — it's baked into the design.

This is the core problem with ALPR systems like Flock's: they're marketed as narrow crime-fighting tools, but they quietly become general-purpose tracking databases that log everyone's movements, all the time, with audit trails that too often go unchecked until a whistleblower or a records request forces the issue. Departments love to point to policy documents that promise safeguards, but policy on paper means little if there's no real oversight, no meaningful penalty for misuse, and no transparency for the public whose plates are being scanned thousands of times a day.

Credit to Flock Off for digging into specific, named incidents instead of leaving this abstract. If you want to see how far this camera network has spread near you, check our map, and if these stories make you want to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for confronting your city council or police department.