Police supervisor accused of misusing Flock license plate reader
The short version: A Conyers PD supervisor allegedly abused Flock ALPR access to track a domestic partner, proving the 'trust us' pitch for mass plate surveillance is hollow.
Our Take
Atlanta News First is reporting that a 30-year-old supervisor with the Conyers Police Department allegedly used her agency's Flock Safety license plate reader access to search for someone she was in a domestic relationship with. This is exactly the scenario privacy advocates have warned about since these camera networks started multiplying on street corners nationwide: the technology doesn't just watch strangers, it hands insiders a tool to stalk people in their own lives.
Flock and local police departments love to sell these systems as narrowly focused on stolen cars and Amber Alerts, with audit logs standing in for real oversight. But an audit log only catches misuse after the fact, and only if someone bothers to look. A badge and a login are all it takes to turn a 'public safety tool' into a surveillance weapon against an ex, a coworker, or anyone else an officer decides to look up. That's not a hypothetical anymore, it's a pattern showing up in city after city.
Credit to Atlanta News First for pushing this story into the open, because departments rarely volunteer this kind of accountability on their own. If you want to know whether your own neighborhood is being watched by one of these networks, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for the next abuse case to make headlines, see what you can do right now on our take action page.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Atlanta News First, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.