Five Indianapolis officers charged in Flock camera abuse cases

A growing record of abuse

In San Jose, California, city officials called for limits on police access to license-plate readers after an officer was fired for sharing Flock data with his cousin, who was accused of domestic violence.

These are only the latest known cases. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 244 separate instances of police abusing such systems—but that figure counts only cases where officers were caught.

Flock’s nationwide network now includes more than 140,000 license-plate readers. The documented abuses have ranged from personal vendettas to surveillance of people who had done nothing wrong:

Tracking people with whom officers had romantic relationships

Retaliating against critics

Running unauthorized searches at the request of immigration agents

Monitoring activists

Harassing colleagues

Searching for a domestic-violence victim at the alleged abuser’s request

Tracking Muslims driving to mosques

Using the systems out of boredom

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen abuse of automated license-plate readers almost since these systems first appeared,” Beryl Lipton, a senior researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in an interview. In late August, it emerged that 10 police officers in the Chicago area had abused such systems in separate cases.

The network changes the scale

Lipton said these systems used to be less interconnected. Flock’s linked cameras now make it possible to misuse access on a larger scale and across state lines.

That distinction matters. The record is not just a series of isolated incidents: at least 244 abuses have been documented across the country, while the network itself spans more than 140,000 readers.

My read is that the number of caught officers is less revealing than the gap between that count and the scale of the network. The Institute for Justice’s tally is a floor, not a measure of how often the systems are misused.

Many angry protesters direct their criticism at the company that supplies the cameras. But the people who use the system to pursue innocent residents are police officers. The unresolved tension is that broader access makes the network more useful for tracking vehicles—and makes individual abuses capable of reaching well beyond one department.

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