700 Searches and Nobody Noticed: The Flock Camera Story That Should Worry You

A Florida cop tracked his estranged wife’s car 717 times over about a year and a half using an automated licence plate reader network called Flock Safety. She only found out because a Washington Post reporter rang her up doing a story on officers misusing the system. Not an audit. Not an internal review. A journalist made a phone call.

I’ve spent enough years in IT to know that “the system will flag misuse” is one of those sentences people say to make themselves feel better about deploying something they haven’t properly thought through. Every logging system I’ve ever worked with had the capability to flag anomalies. Almost none of them did it automatically, because someone has to build that, someone has to fund that, and someone has to actually look at the dashboard. Seven hundred searches on one plate over eighteen months is not subtle. That’s not a needle in a haystack, that’s a bloke standing in the middle of the haystack holding a sign.

What gets me is the justification he gave when finally asked: assault, drugs, motor vehicle offences. Generic enough to sound plausible, specific enough to tick a box on a form nobody was checking. He later told a supervisor the real reason, he wanted to know where the kids were when they were with their mother. That’s not policing. That’s using a state surveillance tool to keep tabs on an ex-partner, full stop. The badge is what let him get away with it for as long as he did.

I don’t think most people, when they hear “licence plate reader,” picture this. They picture stolen cars, amber alerts, maybe a bit of speed camera style revenue raising that everyone grumbles about at the pub. What they don’t picture is a colleague using it as a personal stalking tool, because the system trusts anyone with a login and assumes good faith. That assumption is the whole problem. It’s the same assumption baked into half the workplace access controls I’ve had to clean up after some contractor left the company two years ago and still had admin rights.

We’ve got our own version of this creeping in here, more cameras on more corners, more automated number plate recognition on Victorian roads, all justified the same way every time: catching bad guys, protecting kids, nothing to worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong. I don’t love that framing. Most surveillance systems get sold on the worst case they might stop and go quiet about the ordinary, boring ways they’ll actually get used, which is exactly this: a person with access and a grudge and no one watching the watcher.

None of this means the technology itself is evil. Finding an actual missing kid or a genuine stolen vehicle with one of these systems is a real, good thing that happens. But good outcomes in the rare case don’t excuse a design that makes abuse this easy and detection this slow. If it takes a reporter’s phone call rather than an internal audit to catch 717 searches on one plate, the oversight isn’t a feature of the system, it’s an afterthought bolted on for the marketing brochure.

The fix isn’t complicated, even if it’s inconvenient for whoever’s selling the cameras: mandatory audit trails that someone actually reviews, real consequences for misuse that go beyond “official misconduct” as a euphemism, and a hard rule that officers can’t run plates connected to their own relationships or disputes, full stop, no discretion. None of that requires new technology. It requires people who built the system to care as much about the edge cases as they did about the pitch to city council. I’d like to think that’s not too much to ask. I’m just not entirely convinced anymore that it isn’t.