Institute for Justice documented 14 confirmed cases of officers abusing Flock ALPR networks to stalk romantic partners, with most incidents surfacing only after victims reported stalking.
Key Takeaways
Flock Safety and other ALPR vendors have internal audit tools, but most of the 14 cases were caught by victims reporting officers, not by internal systems.
Milwaukee case was exposed when victims checked their own records on HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a site aggregating publicly available Flock audit logs.
14 is almost certainly an undercount: officers routinely enter vague or inaccurate search reasons in ALPR systems to obscure misconduct.
Nearly all named officers were criminally charged and fired or resigned; at least one (Kenosha) received severance pay despite confirmed misuse.
Institute for Justice’s Plate Privacy Project is pursuing litigation in San Jose and Norfolk arguing warrantless ALPR access is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged a concrete audit-log regression: one local FOIA requester reported Flock changed its December 2025 log format, removing per-officer UserID data that had previously enabled independent stalking detection.
Debate split between “individual bad actors” framing and “institutional failure” framing; technical commenters leaned toward the latter, noting Flock could build anomaly-detection tooling but hasn’t prioritized it.
A court-watcher commenter noted ALPR-style surveillance tool abuse in domestic violence cases is routine, and administrative-role abusers get caught more often because automated audits more clearly flag unnecessary access.
Notable Comments
@loteck: Reports Flock’s December 2025 log “improvement” removed per-UserID search data, directly undermining the community audit methodology that caught at least one prior stalking case.
@randusername: Links Substack report alleging Flock employees themselves appear in audit logs accessing private business camera feeds including pools and gymnastics studios.
