Flock cameras used by 50+ US officers to stalk women, exes

A woman opens a public-records tool and discovers her police-officer ex-boyfriend queried her location 600 times through a nationwide camera network. That anecdote sits inside a Washington Post investigation that counted at least 50 US law-enforcement officers charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers, with 26 of those cases involving officers who used the technology to spy on wives, girlfriends, exes, exes' new partners, or women they wanted to meet.

The infrastructure the Post is describing is Flock Safety's network of more than 120,000 shoebox-size cameras across more than 6,000 communities, recording 20 billion plate scans a month. That is the scale that made the pattern possible. An Orange City, Florida officer allegedly ran his ex-girlfriend's plate through Flock at least 69 times, her mother's plate at least 24 times, and her father's plate at least 15 times. Victims mostly found out through public-records tools rather than internal audits, via a site called Have I Been Flocked that aggregates police search logs.

Flock's own answer, as reported by the Post, is that policing officers is not really the company's job. CEO Garrett Langley told the paper "we're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions" and that what the company can do is make sure officers know they will be held accountable. He pointed at a voluntary "audit assistance" feature the company rolled out in April that scans searches for suspicious patterns, like queries repeatedly targeting the same vehicle or run off the clock. The Institute for Justice and other groups have proposed a harder line, that Flock searches should be permitted only for officers who have obtained a warrant from a judge.

The honest caveat is that the 50 is a floor built from what has already surfaced in police and court records across a dozen states; how many undiscovered lookups sit inside a monthly total of 20 billion scans is not something the reporting can tell you. The Post also does not lay out how many Flock-using departments have actually turned the voluntary audit feature on, or how many of the accused officers were criminally convicted versus quietly resigned.

What is worth watching from here is procurement and legislation. Cities renewing Flock contracts now have a concrete tally to point at when arguing for mandatory auditing rather than opt-in, rival ALPR vendors have a clean pitch for default-on abuse detection, and the warrant-requirement idea has real numbers behind it for the first time.