In my town, we have Flock. I request the audit logs that show how police are searching the Flock system.
In November 2025 and prior, the logs were listed by USERID and I could independently correlate quantity of searches by USERID to detect unusual search behavior. This same methodology has been used to catch police stalking in at least one other city.
In December 2025, Flock decided to "improve" its system. All searches on the audit log are now completely serialized, anonymized. This "improvement" came after 2025 turned out several cases of police stalking using Flock.
I would guess the only way to make this data available long term is by regulation. Then again, I would hope Flock is subject to FOIA already if they are collaborating with state or local law enforcement...
Why? Is there something about their dataset and/or methodology that you can identify as deficient that would indicate that the rate is much higher than what was published?
I agree with the sentiment, but if you want anyone to do anything about it we need evidence and not vibes.
I'm trying to help you make your case. So far the only comments in this thread are the most low-effort reactions that don't say anything substantive.
> I agree with the sentiment, but if you want anyone to do anything about it we need evidence and not vibes.
I don't believe your concern trolling tone here - I'm not asking anyone to do anything either. I'm pointing out this is likely much more prevalent, based on the absolute fact most abuse/stalking cases go unreported, so this is likely a small subset of a larger problem. The "evidence" is these cases existing at all. In any case, flock data is mostly invisible and the police that use it get very little oversight. So how do you suggest I get any evidence? Shall I hack into their systems? Get real.
Even in the article:
> Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation.
> The 14 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount. Not all police misconduct gets detected, and some cases likely get resolved quietly. Officers frequently cite vague or inaccurate reasons for their searches in ALPR systems, sometimes to evade detection of misconduct.
The evidence is just "human nature". Honestly, it's just negligence at this point to give people power over others without due oversight and accountability. But it's nice we have concrete examples of abuse to help motivate action.
The data set IJ is providing here is situations where stalking was reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted. Other stalking cases could fail any one of those stages and be invisible to the public.
> Other stalking cases could fail any one of those stages and be invisible to the public.
"could" is doing a lot of work here...
> where stalking was reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted.
No, that's not what IJ said. From the article: "Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired."
So not all 14 of these were "reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted".
If you're trying to make significant social change, make the strongest argument that you are capable of.
I don't think "could" is doing a lot of work here at all. It seems logical that if cases where the misuse of flock systems were discovered only when the same officers misbehaved in other, more visible situations then there are officers that avoid the more visible situations and continue to use the system that does not expose their bad behavior (flock).
The decades-long history of police abuse of power isn't enough? There is not a single power they have not abused eventually, and it's quite obvious that introducing new powers will inevitability be exploited.
A "review of media reports" is not going to capture any incidents that the media didn't report on. That doesn't strike me as likely to capture every incident, or even a majority of incidents.
FTA: The 14 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount.
I feel that supports the original comment, considering it's all subjective.
Now, you are going to be tempted to start arguing that "almost certainly an undercount" doesn't support the original comment. But remember, it's subjective, and any reasonable person reading that comment and the article could see how "at least" could be seen as doing a lot of work.
I wouldn't say I am a huge proponent of Flock, especially considering their lack luster security for the individual cameras at least in my area, but the title makes it sound like it's an institutional procedure that the department stalking their romantic interests instead of individual officers that need to be properly reprimanded.
It is institutional in the sense that Flock and the individual PDs have not put steps in place (either post auditing or pre not allowing bad queries) that prevent the abuse.
Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to.
It's a system whose implementations don't do anything to prevent or even detect this. It's not licensed by seat, so it doesn't require SSO and when the data was available it was obvious that most departments use shared accounts. There are no laws to regulate the use of it, so they do not. It gets rushed into production via Federal grants with limited time windows.
If you have a system that isn't designed around accountability in a place like a police department, you won't get accountability, and you will get institutionalized poor behavior. It's one of the reasons that state police organizations are usually considered more "professional" or better disciplined than most local departments.
Bureaucracy and size reduces random dumbass employee use of their discretion. People look the other way less often when there is a record of malfesance right in front of them. You don't need to be "pro" or "against" police to demand accountability.
Police abuse of power in the US is a systemic problem. Your opinion is akin to thinking the Catholic church bears no burden for all the diddling they neglected to observe.
Do you make any distinction between sheriff's departments that are elected into their office (e.g. Jacksonville Sheriff's Office) vs commissioned LEOs?
The title doesn't make that sound like that at all. Unless you think in any world there woukd be able institutional procedure to abuse systems like that. To normal people it reads like police abusing the systems they have access to.
I've mentioned this before but I've been a volunteer court watcher for domestic violence court for some years now. Cases where a state surveillance tool or database was used to stalk or harass the victim are completely routine.
Very often it is someone in an administrative role who has access to the tool, and I think they get caught more often because it's easier for automated audits to flag their use as clearly unnecessary. LEOs have a lot of benefit of the doubt on that and, from what I can tell, are pretty much free to do what they want with these tools.
I do follow up on cases, I'm not supposed to participate in court but I can contribute community impact statements about systemic patterns I've observed. I haven't so far ever seen one of the cops in front of another court for this behavior, even when it was clearly documented by an order of protection being granted in DV court.
I assume this problem is far far worse than I can perceive. Victims will only bring this to court with a lot of support and clear evidence, and even then with the offender being police, it's risky and frightening. Our police are automatically placed on administrative leave if served an order of protection, so the local judges are extremely resistant to ever actually granting one.
Ah, so then they just resumed another law enforcement job in the next town over like so many do, whose investigations into their criminal activity was terminated because they resigned, and because they were never charged or fired, then they have a clean record to apply elsewhere.
I have always gravitated towards a market model. Force police, like doctors, to have malpractice insurance. Let for-profit insurance companies model what that risk looks like. Now cities have to make a financial decision when hiring cops that is directionally accurate to the risk of said cop. Imperfect but I don’t believe perfect systems exist.
But this goes back to government agencies never thinking about budgets. Modern politics is about marketing a tax reduction but never how that impacts the budget.
Absolutely! This would also mean when cops break the law taxpayers don't pay out. Their privately held insurance does. Enough bad behavior and a criminal cop becomes uninsurable. This also prevents the abuse where a criminal cop gets fired, then moved over to another jurisdiction to repeat the process all over again. The insurance companies should have to share history with one another.
Perhaps the only tweak would be to regulate these insurance companies to control their profit margins. We don't want to end up in the same situation as medical insurance in the US. Tax payers will have to pay some of the insurance premiums indirectly. So this idea can work well so long as insurance is in that goldilox zone: enough to provide incentive for the companies to exist, but not so much that their greed creates an even worse system.
Agree but better than the system we have today. There will always be issues with it but I think on average it would better incentivize hiring lower risk employees.
This is pretty straightforward actually. The third party doctrine [1] has been extrapolated to the digital age to the massive detriment of privacy. All it takes is for Congress to pass a law clarifying to the courts that the third party doctrine isn't correct.
There's also an alteration to the interpretation of "reasonable expectation of privacy" that could be made (again, by Congress) to account for the total sum of information, rather than each individual piece of information in isolation. For example, I have no expectation of privacy that people don't see my license plate when I'm driving but I don't expect that a single person/entity would have all of the locations my license plate has been in the last 3 days.
The other clarification/change Congress could make would be to change the "reasonable expectation" test to something less susceptible to erosion over time. (I didn't used to expect I'd be tracked in certain way because I thought it would have been illegal but now I do expect it even though I still feel it's illegal). The reasonable expectation test encourages normalizing surveillance for as long as possible before it gets to court so that it's unreasonable to expect otherwise.
All of these things, of course, would be still within the grasp of investigators with a simple warrant which would normally take less than an hour to attain.
In November 2025 and prior, the logs were listed by USERID and I could independently correlate quantity of searches by USERID to detect unusual search behavior. This same methodology has been used to catch police stalking in at least one other city.
In December 2025, Flock decided to "improve" its system. All searches on the audit log are now completely serialized, anonymized. This "improvement" came after 2025 turned out several cases of police stalking using Flock.
Isn't FOIA only applicable to federal government agencies?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234
If you build it they will come.
How many of those do you think have open and available records for their use of surveillance tech?
I agree with the sentiment, but if you want anyone to do anything about it we need evidence and not vibes.
I'm trying to help you make your case. So far the only comments in this thread are the most low-effort reactions that don't say anything substantive.
I don't believe your concern trolling tone here - I'm not asking anyone to do anything either. I'm pointing out this is likely much more prevalent, based on the absolute fact most abuse/stalking cases go unreported, so this is likely a small subset of a larger problem. The "evidence" is these cases existing at all. In any case, flock data is mostly invisible and the police that use it get very little oversight. So how do you suggest I get any evidence? Shall I hack into their systems? Get real.
Even in the article:
> Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation.
> The 14 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount. Not all police misconduct gets detected, and some cases likely get resolved quietly. Officers frequently cite vague or inaccurate reasons for their searches in ALPR systems, sometimes to evade detection of misconduct.
And regarding this:
> I'm trying to help you make your case.
Nah, I don't believe you.
These 14 just were sloppy and left such an egregious fact pattern in their wake that a public record was created (firing, charges filed, etc)
"could" is doing a lot of work here...
> where stalking was reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted.
No, that's not what IJ said. From the article: "Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired."
So not all 14 of these were "reported/suspected, investigated, discovered, and prosecuted".
If you're trying to make significant social change, make the strongest argument that you are capable of.
Your Bayesian priors desperately need an update.
> Other stalking cases could fail any one of those stages and be invisible to the public. > "could" is doing a lot of work here...
I'd be careful replying to someone commenting and editing with such large diffs without calling it out. Fairly deceptive.
That's quite different from this situation.
FTA: The 14 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount.
I feel that supports the original comment, considering it's all subjective.
Now, you are going to be tempted to start arguing that "almost certainly an undercount" doesn't support the original comment. But remember, it's subjective, and any reasonable person reading that comment and the article could see how "at least" could be seen as doing a lot of work.
Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to.
Edit -- I see Flock does have some audit tools, https://www.flocksafety.com/trust/compliance-tools. If those work as they should, it is more on PDs to use them properly.
If you have a system that isn't designed around accountability in a place like a police department, you won't get accountability, and you will get institutionalized poor behavior. It's one of the reasons that state police organizations are usually considered more "professional" or better disciplined than most local departments.
Bureaucracy and size reduces random dumbass employee use of their discretion. People look the other way less often when there is a record of malfesance right in front of them. You don't need to be "pro" or "against" police to demand accountability.
Very often it is someone in an administrative role who has access to the tool, and I think they get caught more often because it's easier for automated audits to flag their use as clearly unnecessary. LEOs have a lot of benefit of the doubt on that and, from what I can tell, are pretty much free to do what they want with these tools.
I do follow up on cases, I'm not supposed to participate in court but I can contribute community impact statements about systemic patterns I've observed. I haven't so far ever seen one of the cops in front of another court for this behavior, even when it was clearly documented by an order of protection being granted in DV court.
I assume this problem is far far worse than I can perceive. Victims will only bring this to court with a lot of support and clear evidence, and even then with the offender being police, it's risky and frightening. Our police are automatically placed on administrative leave if served an order of protection, so the local judges are extremely resistant to ever actually granting one.
>>Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired.
Ah, so then they just resumed another law enforcement job in the next town over like so many do, whose investigations into their criminal activity was terminated because they resigned, and because they were never charged or fired, then they have a clean record to apply elsewhere.
But this goes back to government agencies never thinking about budgets. Modern politics is about marketing a tax reduction but never how that impacts the budget.
Perhaps the only tweak would be to regulate these insurance companies to control their profit margins. We don't want to end up in the same situation as medical insurance in the US. Tax payers will have to pay some of the insurance premiums indirectly. So this idea can work well so long as insurance is in that goldilox zone: enough to provide incentive for the companies to exist, but not so much that their greed creates an even worse system.
Markets are not perfect but on average they do a decent job of finding equilibrium.
“Democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others that have been tried.”
There's also an alteration to the interpretation of "reasonable expectation of privacy" that could be made (again, by Congress) to account for the total sum of information, rather than each individual piece of information in isolation. For example, I have no expectation of privacy that people don't see my license plate when I'm driving but I don't expect that a single person/entity would have all of the locations my license plate has been in the last 3 days.
The other clarification/change Congress could make would be to change the "reasonable expectation" test to something less susceptible to erosion over time. (I didn't used to expect I'd be tracked in certain way because I thought it would have been illegal but now I do expect it even though I still feel it's illegal). The reasonable expectation test encourages normalizing surveillance for as long as possible before it gets to court so that it's unreasonable to expect otherwise.
All of these things, of course, would be still within the grasp of investigators with a simple warrant which would normally take less than an hour to attain.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
There's no reason the same doctrine couldn't extend to digital papers and effects.
Nice it was highlighted but the big question, will something be done about this ? I think we all know the answer to this.
The only surprise is "14 times", I would expect hundreds of times.