Yes, the cop who uses a Flock camera to track an ex is a problem. Fire him and be done with it. Several Wisconsin cases already made that point, and they should. A badge is not a hall pass to stalk someone you used to date.
That still does not mean every search is a scandal. It does not mean Elm Grove is being watched by California in some malicious way. And it does not mean the answer is to yank the cameras down for the copper because the left suddenly found a new thing to organize against.
Dan Lennington’s Federalist piece on Elm Grove is worth reading. A village of 6,500 put up six cameras. Local officers run a few dozen searches a month. The audit logs show more than a million hits most months, many from out-of-state agencies with the California Highway Patrol leads the pack.
A camera appearing in a nationwide plate query is not the same as an officer sitting in Sacramento watching Brookfield Road. A national lookup pings every camera that opted into the network. The log records the ping. It does not prove a human opened the image, studied the driveway, or built a file on your minivan. Treating a hit like a stakeout is how you turn a tool into a morality play.
Flock works and cops believe in the technology. In fact, we are seeing historic crime reductions across the country. This tool starts to finally cut into crime, stolen cars get recovered, hit-and-runs are no longer safe, or a missing person gets found. Now it seems Flock is in the sights of the new current thing to hate resulting in lawusits and now a dozen Wisconsin towns bag the cameras in a week.
Some of the distrust is earned. Flock has had messy data fights with local agencies after seemingly misleading municipalities on what data was kept. That is simply something that could be fixed in their terms of service and not the legal route. Officers have typed garbage into the reason box. Those are reasons to audit, lock accounts, and prosecute. They are not reasons to throw the whole system in the lake. The haste to ban is a left-wing reflex that are libertarian senses fall victim too. Break the tool first. Debate the tradeoffs never.
This is not happening in a vacuum. You already have left-leaning judges, public defenders, and a social justice legal class working overtime to put the same offenders back on the street. In that world, a passive camera on a public road is not tyranny. It is an extra set of eyes when the courtroom set is trying to close them.
Flock wants some free advice? Publish the ratio. How many searches are dirty personal lookups versus homicide, theft, AMBER Alert, and warrant work? I will bet the split is not close. If the company will not say it, departments should. Truth beats the moral panic. Municipalities do need to do some work to protect their citizens, but fix the abuse and keep the tool. The people who want the cameras gone are not mainly worried about your privacy. They are worried the cameras work a little too well.
