Flock Is The New Tool Of Choice For Cops Who Love Stalking Their Exes

from the flock-aspires-to-be-the-birds-in-‘The-Birds’ dept

Cops are human beings. Despite constantly pretending they’re on a higher plane (see also: Thin Blue Line, etc.), they’re just as fallible as anyone else. Especially now.

This occupation is self-selecting. Righting wrongs is rarely the main draw. It’s almost always the immense of amount of power that comes coupled with nearly zero accountability. There have always been more Nottingham Sheriff wannabes in law enforcement than there have been Frank Serpicos.

Which is why we should not be giving them more powerful tech tools with each passing year. The last thing most officers need is another avenue for the casual abuse of the general public… which really means “women.”

Since always, police have been abusing their access to databases, surveillance tech, and government records to do everything from stalk their exes to harass critics and protesters. And yet, we keep giving cops tools that grease the wheels of misconduct.

As the Institute for Justice detailed in a report it released last month, cops are using now-ubiquitous automatic license plate readers (ALPR) to stalk ex-wives and ex-girlfriends when not using them to do other things like track women seeking abortions or seek out potential paramours they can stalk later following the inevitable break-up.

Flock is the latest, greatest player in the ALPR market. Consequently, the company that’s already engaged in a ton of unforced errors is now the name that comes up most when cops are being arrested and prosecuted for using this tech to further cement their reputations as the USA’s foremost purveyors of domestic violence.

So, what does this mean in practical terms? Well, it means this, which is super-disturbing and only discusses a cop who was caught using Flock tech to stalk his ex-girlfriend, as detailed by Jason Koebler at 404 Media:

For months during the summer of 2024, Jarmarus Brown, an Orange City, Florida police officer, ran his ex-girlfriend’s license plate through the Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) system lookup database at least 69 times. He searched for the license plate belonging to her mom at least 24 times, and searched for the license plate belonging to her dad at least 15 times. Brown’s searches were happening so often, and were so commonplace, that even one of his colleagues noticed Brown researching his ex-girlfriend’s whereabouts while the law enforcement officers sat in their police cruisers, according to court records obtained by 404 Media.

[…]

On another occasion, Brown told [fellow officer Sharich] King that he believed his ex was lying about her whereabouts. She “told Jarmarus she was at her house with her mother, but Jarmarus knew for a fact she was not. When questioned by Officer King as to how he knew for a fact she was lying, Jarmarus said he used the Flock system and saw that her vehicle was elsewhere,” the affidavit reads. “Jarmarus then asked Officer King if he wanted to join him on a ‘stakeout’ to try to see where her vehicle was located.” 

Horrific enough, but that was combined with other things his ex-girlfriend stated in her testimony, including Officer Jarmarus Brown insisting his girlfriend remain on the phone with him throughout her workday and surreptitiously placing an AirTag on her wallet.

And all of this makes Officer Brown (who served one [1!] day in jail before being released on probation) both the tip of iceberg and the par for the course.

I’m sure some commenters will show up to say stupid things about my sweeping generalizations. But the only reason I generalize is because there’s just so much out there in the public sphere that limiting myself to specific cases is waste of everyone’s time.

Every surveillance product has just made police misconduct more efficient. Name one that hasn’t. I’ll wait.

Accountability tech hasn’t produced better accountability. We get occasional wins from body cams and dash cams, but the fact is cops still have access to on/off switches and law enforcement agencies still retain control of recordings. More to the point: these are not technically “surveillance products.”

Everything else has given cops more options and more information. And far too many cops have chosen to apply the power and ignore the responsibility that’s supposed to come packaged with it.

Flock may still pretend it and its customers are above reproach, but it does at least generate publicly-accessible records that can be used to sniff out police misconduct that may have otherwise flown under the radar.

It is definitely the case that Flock’s audit tools have proven useful in holding police accountable, because journalists, activists, and concerned citizens from around the country have pored through Flock audit logs that they have obtained through public records requests to document abuse. 

Hold your applause forever. This isn’t a triumph of transparency or the result of Flock trying to be a better public citizen. It’s the opposite thing: it’s the government doing next to nothing to hold public servants accountable and leaving it to the people with the least amount of power to do the heavy lifting for them:

[M]any cases of abuse have not been detected by police departments themselves but by those private citizens, journalists, and stalking victims who have found patterns of abuse in public records files they have obtained from their local police departments. In most cases of Flock-related stalking reviewed by 404 Media, the abuse occurred over the course of months or years, and the victims were subjected to dozens or hundreds of lookups.

Public leaders are supposed to set the example and make the tough decisions to hold public servants accountable. This demonstrates, yet again, they can’t be trusted to carry out even the most basic prerequisites of their positions. The public does the work and still pays the tab.

No government agency would ever do the sort of work being done by privacy activists, most likely because they’d rather not know just how bad things are in the surveillance state they’ve allowed to flourish. Just being underserved would be bad enough. But we’re getting actively screwed from multiple angles.

In Wisconsin, a stalking victim checked her own license plate on HaveIBeenFlocked.com and learned that City of Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala had searched her license plate more than 100 times. After reporting this alleged abuse to the police, the agency ran its own audit and learned that Ayala had also searched the license plate of a second victim 124 times in a two-month span last year, according to court records. Each time, Ayala simply listed “investigation” as the reason  for his search. In another alleged abuse case in Idaho, the police chief used Flock to allegedly stalk his wife using the reason “test” in the Flock system.

This should be so embarrassing that public figures would be calling for immediate reform and termination of Flock contracts. Instead, it usually leads to impasses where one side insists that any amount of surveillance is justified for “public safety” reasons while the other side is expected to spend their own time and money pursuing litigation in state and federal courts. Even when the abuses are obvious, officials pretend it’s a singular problem, rather than a trailing indicator of the expected outcome of giving even more power to people with plenty of power and long history of abusing it.

Filed Under: acab, alprs, florida, jamarus brown, police misconduct, surveillance, surveillance abuse

Companies: flock, flock safety