The Cop With the Database and the Ex Who Won't Let Go

There’s a story doing the rounds about the Flock AI licence plate reader system, and how at least 18 police officers in the US have been arrested for using it to stalk romantic partners. Eighteen that we know of. Arrested. Meaning the actual number of people who used it that way is almost certainly higher, because most of them didn’t get caught, and some who got caught probably didn’t get arrested.

The stalking angle is genuinely frightening. But the part that keeps nagging at me is simpler and more structural: the safeguard was “write a reason in the box.” That’s it. An honour system. For a surveillance tool. Given to people with a documented domestic violence rate that multiple researchers have pegged at around 40 percent, and that’s self-reported. The actual number is almost certainly worse.

Someone in the discussion thread I was reading put it cleanly: “We investigated ourselves and found no bullshit afoot until next time.” Which is funny, until you remember there are real people on the other end of this. Women who moved interstate. Women who kept their licence registered to an old address for years just to feel safe. Someone who shared that she didn’t update her address for three years every time she moved, always keeping it one step behind. That’s not paranoia. That’s a rational response to a real threat from someone who has institutional access to your location.

The thread had a lot of people sharing variations of the same experience: dated a cop, relationship ended, years of low-grade terror followed. One person’s sister had a cop become interested in her, was told no repeatedly, and he eventually drove them both off the online spaces where they had mutual friends. Just attrition. Quiet, relentless, and completely invisible to anyone who wasn’t living it.

I don’t think all cops are predators. I do think the structure around policing selects for certain behaviours and protects them once they emerge. If your partner is a colleague’s colleague, if the person you’d call for help is the person causing the harm, if internal complaints go into what one commenter described as “a binder that only gets opened if liability becomes a concern,” then the institution isn’t a check on bad behaviour. It’s a buffer.

This isn’t unique to policing, which is maybe the more uncomfortable point. The thread referenced healthcare workers accessing medical records out of curiosity, a German football coach who nearly lost his volunteer role because a police officer confused him with his brother and told people about it, a Minnesota woman who discovered hundreds of officers across multiple cities had been looking her up in the vehicle registration system just to ask her out after she lost weight. Hundreds of officers. Multiple cities. One woman.

The common thread is access without accountability. Logging systems that nobody audits. Complaint mechanisms that require the victim to already know something happened. Audit trails that exist primarily to protect the institution from liability after the fact, not to catch anything in real time.

In Australia we have our own versions of this, less dramatic but structurally similar. Access to sensitive databases has periodically been misused here too, and the standard response is the same: individual disciplinary action, promises of better training, the system basically unchanged. Victoria Police has had its own controversies around internal culture and the treatment of women both inside and outside the force. None of this is a uniquely American problem.

What makes Flock interesting, and by interesting I mean troubling, is that it’s private infrastructure. It’s a company selling surveillance capability to law enforcement with the promise that internal safeguards will prevent misuse. The government systems at least have some form of mandatory audit trail. Flock was apparently running on the assumption that people would tell the truth in a text field. For a system tracking the physical movements of anyone who drives past a camera.

I’m genuinely fascinated by what AI-assisted surveillance can do, in the same way I’m fascinated by most things that represent a step change in capability. But capability without accountability isn’t progress. It’s just a more efficient way to do the things that were already going wrong.

The 18 arrested officers are the visible edge of something larger. The question worth asking isn’t why those 18 did it. It’s how many didn’t get caught, and what exactly is supposed to stop them.

I don’t have a tidy answer to that. I’m not sure one exists.