It’s Official: Flock Is For Stalking

from the cop-specific-sickness dept

Flock Safety is happy it’s the go-to choice for tons of law enforcement agencies. While it does suffer some occasional bleeding, its supercharged automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) — ones that not only capture plates, but pictures of drivers/passengers and full vehicle images to capture any other distinctive features — are so widely deployed they’re now capturing 20 billion images per month across the nation.

Not bad for a company that started out pitching its spy wares to HOAs and gated communities. Most cops in America now have access to Flock’s databases, either directly or by asking those with access to run searches for them. Just ask federal law enforcement officers, who have asked for help so often its gotten them (and their enablers) in legal trouble.

Whether the cameras are being used to solve crimes, pull over innocent drivers, or help vengeful boyfriends attempt to thwart out-of-state abortions, Flock is there to… um… help?

The problem with 20 billion plates a month is this: cops have access to these records. It’s not that Flock has somehow made cops worse. They’ve been abusing access to databases like these for years to stalk exes, pursue sexual conquests, and harass protesters and critics.

So, this isn’t a Flock problem, per se. It’s definitely a cop problem, though. Millions of employed people have access to sensitive or proprietary information. Very few of them misuse their access. But there’s something about law enforcement that draws in people willing to abuse access for extremely personal reasons.

Some of that is the lack of accountability that plagues US law enforcement as a whole. Some of that is due to a dearth of guardrails or rigorous oversight. But I would argue the largest contributor to the ongoing, serial abuse of Flock’s databases by officers is the culture of law enforcement itself. There’s little in the job that would attract the best people needed to fill these positions. Instead, the promise of power and nearly nonexistent accountability attracts abusers, bullies, thugs, and random people who think the world owes them an elevated place in society.

In other words, if cops were really honest about why they became cops, it would go something like this:

It’s been a steady stream of THIS for a few months now. In May, the Institute of Justice released a report detailing abusive access to Flock databases by cops, dating back to 2021. Dozens of criminal cases against cops were detailed, but nearly every one of them had this in common: officers were using Flock ALPRs to track ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-fiancees — in other words, women — along with their new partners, friends, and acquaintances.

A few weeks later, even more details in ongoing cases were revealed via public records and court proceedings obtained by 404 Media.

This is what stalking looks like when cops have access to Flock ALPR records:

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…

Pretty fucked up. What’s even more fucked up is the end result of Brown’s prosecution, which is only going to encourage more cops to abuse their access to ALPR databases:

Brown was arrested last year and pleaded no contest to a charge of unauthorized use of computers. He was sentenced this month to five years of probation and a $618 fine.

This story isn’t going away. A new report from the Washington Post shows Flock has a cop problem, mainly because cop shops have a cop problem. Cops cannot be trusted to not use millions of easily available records to stalk their ex-wives, girlfriends, etc.

Braselton, Georgia (a suburb of Atlanta) was once home to Police Chief Michael Steffman. Steffman apparently couldn’t handle not knowing what his ex-girlfriend, Marci Bakely, was up to. Here’s how it started:

Flock had sold its system as a police officer’s dream crime-fighting tool. But the tool had also given the chief, Michael Steffman, the power to silently monitor Bakely’s life. By the time she understood what was happening, Steffman had looked up the tags for her and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times, according to Have I Been Flocked, a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.

This wasn’t spread out over the course of several years. (And not that a longer spread would make it any more acceptable.) These 600 searches occurred over the span of eight months. Roughly twice a day, the police chief was running searches targeting his ex-girlfriend and her daughter. Even the police chief gets days off, so the searches were definitely happening more than twice per (work) day.

Steffman was arrested last November and charged with stalking, harassment, and misuse of the Flock database. Steffman chose to escape justice.

In April, before a trial could take place, he was found dead in his home from what officials said was a suicide.

Steffman is not an outlier. He’s just another symptom of a law enforcement-specific disease:

In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, according to a police affidavit for a case set for trial this month.

In Kansas, a police chief who tracked his ex through Flock sneaked up on her while she was intimate with another man, a state police certification body alleged, leading to his firing.

In Florida, a deputy speeding to stop a young actress he’d added to a watch list for a license-plate tool called Guardian nearly caused a head-on crash, according to a police report and video from his dashboard camera. The deputy was arrested in March, and his attorney declined to comment.

And in California, prosecutors said a former deputy, Alexander Vanny, used Flock as part of a months-long campaign of “stalking” and “humiliating” his former fiancée that also involved following her around town and installing a hidden camera in her roommate’s bathroom, according to a sentencing brief.

This data just keeps coming in. Public records are being compiled at scale to allow people (you know, non-cops) to see how often their plate records have been accessed by law enforcement officers. There’s no PR win on the horizon for Flock, which has been largely (and belatedly) reactive to exposures of abuse by officers and further abuse by agencies who use other agencies to run searches they can’t legally perform themselves.

The comment offered in response to the Post’s reporting is par for the course:

After The Post relayed its findings to Flock, the company said in a statement it “will soon be announcing better filters and tools to stop abuse before it happens.”

Oh. OK. Since records of this abuse date back at least a half-decade, you would think Flock would already be on top of this. Instead, it appears to be tossing out a bit more lip service because this story just isn’t going away.

What has been implemented by Flock to date has almost exclusively been tools and guardrails law enforcement agencies can opt in to. None of this is on by default. Training guides and search logs are useless if law enforcement officers and officials aren’t going to read either of them. Voluntary “audit assistance” algorithms that scan for possibly suspicious searches by officers are similarly useless, since they’re entirely optional. If these were applied by default and statements/actions from police oversight groups was needed to remove them, they might actually have an effect. And I find it hard to believe any Flock sales rep is highlighting this optional feature when trying to talk cops into signing a contract.

Everything seen here is just going to keep getting worse. Flock offloads all professional responsibility to its end users. Its end users are rarely interested in accountability, much less proactive measures that might deter police misconduct. The company keeps adding cameras daily, which just gives abusers drawn to the opportunities for abuse that the law enforcement profession provides even more to work with. The victims aren’t the people buying or using these cameras, so they don’t matter and whatever happens to them will just be waved away with bland statements about “bad apples” and Flock spokespeople who abbreviate “we take these concerns seriously” as IDGAF.

Filed Under: acab, alprs, police misconduct, stalking, surveillance, surveillance abuse

Companies: flock, flock safety