When the Watchers Won't Stop Watching: Police, Surveillance, and the Stalking Problem

There’s a story doing the rounds at the moment that has been sitting uncomfortably in my head all week. Researchers reviewing media reports in the US have identified at least 14 cases where police officers used automated licence plate reader (ALPR) systems to stalk romantic interests — current partners, exes, even strangers who happened to catch their eye. And the kicker? That number is almost certainly a laughable undercount.

The technology in question — largely supplied by a company called Flock Safety — is pitched as a community safety tool. Cameras everywhere, reading plates, building databases, helping cops catch criminals. Sounds reasonable on the surface, right? That’s always how these things are sold to us. And then, predictably, humans do what humans do with unchecked power.

What really gets me about this isn’t even the stalking itself, as horrifying as that is. It’s the systemic failure that allowed it to happen repeatedly. According to the reporting, most of these cases only came to light because victims reported the behaviour — not because any internal system flagged it. The safeguards that Flock Safety and police departments like to wave around in their press releases? Largely decorative, it seems. Someone pointed out in a discussion I was reading that a YouTuber documenting one of these cases actually uncovered more Flock employees improperly watching a kids’ gymnastics gym than the number of officers caught stalking ex-partners. That’s not a reassuring data point for anyone.

This isn’t a new pattern either. Anyone who remembers the Edward Snowden revelations will recall that intelligence analysts were caught using XKEYSCORE — one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever built — to spy on former girlfriends. When you hand people extraordinary access to surveillance infrastructure with minimal oversight, a subset of them will absolutely abuse it for personal reasons. That’s not cynicism, that’s just documented history.

My mind drifts to what this looks like closer to home. Australia isn’t immune to these dynamics — we have our own expanding surveillance infrastructure, our own debates about police accountability, and frankly our own troubling statistics around domestic violence and law enforcement. The statistic floating around that roughly 40% of police families experience domestic violence should make anyone think twice about handing officers additional tools to track people without robust, independent oversight.

The uncomfortable truth is that the problem here isn’t really the technology. Licence plate readers are just a tool. The problem is the culture, the lack of meaningful accountability, and the naive assumption that institutional safeguards will hold when someone with access decides to abuse it. Every time a new surveillance technology gets deployed — whether it’s ALPR cameras, facial recognition, or something else entirely — we’re essentially asking “do we trust every single person who will ever have access to this, for the entire time it exists?” And the answer, historically, is obviously no.

There’s a part of me that gets why communities facing genuine crime problems are drawn to these systems. I’m not living in a fantasy world where we just abolish all police technology and everything works out. But the rollout keeps getting ahead of the governance. The cameras go up before the independent audit frameworks are in place. The databases get built before anyone’s seriously asked who can query them and when. And by the time the abuse cases start emerging, the infrastructure is too entrenched to easily remove.

What actually needs to happen is boring but important: mandatory logging with independent review, serious criminal penalties for misuse (not just losing your job), and genuine civilian oversight bodies with real teeth — not rubber-stamp committees. Some US communities are apparently starting to rethink or remove these systems entirely, which is a reasonable response when the trust has been so thoroughly broken.

Fourteen documented cases is almost certainly the floor, not the ceiling. And every one of those cases represents a real person who was surveilled, stalked, and frightened by someone who had sworn to protect them. That’s worth getting angry about, and more importantly, it’s worth demanding something better.