How many of those do you think have open and available records for their use of surveillance tech?
I agree with the sentiment, but if you want anyone to do anything about it we need evidence and not vibes.
I'm trying to help you make your case. So far the only comments in this thread are the most low-effort reactions that don't say anything substantive.
I don't believe your concern trolling tone here - I'm not asking anyone to do anything either. I'm pointing out this is likely much more prevalent, based on the absolute fact most abuse/stalking cases go unreported, so this is likely a small subset of a larger problem. The "evidence" is these cases existing at all. In any case, flock data is mostly invisible and the police that use it get very little oversight. So how do you suggest I get any evidence? Shall I hack into their systems? Get real.
Even in the article:
> Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation.
> The 14 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount. Not all police misconduct gets detected, and some cases likely get resolved quietly. Officers frequently cite vague or inaccurate reasons for their searches in ALPR systems, sometimes to evade detection of misconduct.
And regarding this:
> I'm trying to help you make your case.
Nah, I don't believe you.
FTA: The 14 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount.
I feel that supports the original comment, considering it's all subjective.
Now, you are going to be tempted to start arguing that "almost certainly an undercount" doesn't support the original comment. But remember, it's subjective, and any reasonable person reading that comment and the article could see how "at least" could be seen as doing a lot of work.
In November 2025 and prior, the logs were listed by USERID and I could independently correlate quantity of searches by USERID to detect unusual search behavior. This same methodology has been used to catch police stalking in at least one other city.
In December 2025, Flock decided to "improve" its system. All searches on the audit log are now completely serialized, anonymized. This "improvement" came after 2025 turned out several cases of police stalking using Flock.
To quote him responding to criticism against Flock: "You're thinking Chinese surveillance. US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims."
Isn't FOIA only applicable to federal government agencies?
Do not let your loved ones get romantically involved with cops.
Post auditing is obviously not taken seriously by these departments, and Flock could build tools to do this out of the box (identify weird search patterns) if they wanted to.
Edit -- I see Flock does have some audit tools, https://www.flocksafety.com/trust/compliance-tools. If those work as they should, it is more on PDs to use them properly.
If you have a system that isn't designed around accountability in a place like a police department, you won't get accountability, and you will get institutionalized poor behavior. It's one of the reasons that state police organizations are usually considered more "professional" or better disciplined than most local departments.
Bureaucracy and size reduces random dumbass employee use of their discretion. People look the other way less often when there is a record of malfesance right in front of them. You don't need to be "pro" or "against" police to demand accountability.
In Toronto, police are pressured into gang-like conformity to support their bad apples - from last week:
> A Crown attorney is being accused of suggesting a police witness should have provided false evidence while testifying in court.
> According to the Toronto Star, a heated interaction occurred in the hallway of a Toronto courthouse earlier this year, between Crown attorney Marnie Goldenberg and Constable Edin Hasanbasic of the Toronto Police Service.
> Hasanbasic had been called as a witness in the case of a man accused of hitting a different officer with his motorcycle, with the intent of causing harm.
> Hasanbasic had just told the court that the officer who was struck by the motorcycle “seemed like he was fine” after the incident.
> Goldenberg, according to Hasanbasic’s notes about the encounter, allegedly got angry about his testimony, because it went against the Crown’s case.
> “What am I supposed to do? Lie?” Hasanbasic recalls saying.
> The attorney allegedly responded by saying, “We protect our own.”
Not really, something definitely should be done to correct it but some people have this notion that throwing out the baby with the bath water is and starting over from scratch is the correct action. If anything that will just create new problems and make the ability to hide misdeeds even easier.
But this goes back to government agencies never thinking about budgets. Modern politics is about marketing a tax reduction but never how that impacts the budget.
Perhaps the only tweak would be to regulate these insurance companies to control their profit margins. We don't want to end up in the same situation as medical insurance in the US. Tax payers will have to pay some of the insurance premiums indirectly. So this idea can work well so long as insurance is in that goldilox zone: enough to provide incentive for the companies to exist, but not so much that their greed creates an even worse system.
There's also an alteration to the interpretation of "reasonable expectation of privacy" that could be made (again, by Congress) to account for the total sum of information, rather than each individual piece of information in isolation. For example, I have no expectation of privacy that people don't see my license plate when I'm driving but I don't expect that a single person/entity would have all of the locations my license plate has been in the last 3 days.
The other clarification/change Congress could make would be to change the "reasonable expectation" test to something less susceptible to erosion over time. (I didn't used to expect I'd be tracked in certain way because I thought it would have been illegal but now I do expect it even though I still feel it's illegal). The reasonable expectation test encourages normalizing surveillance for as long as possible before it gets to court so that it's unreasonable to expect otherwise.
All of these things, of course, would be still within the grasp of investigators with a simple warrant which would normally take less than an hour to attain.
There's no reason the same doctrine couldn't extend to digital papers and effects.
Very often it is someone in an administrative role who has access to the tool, and I think they get caught more often because it's easier for automated audits to flag their use as clearly unnecessary. LEOs have a lot of benefit of the doubt on that and, from what I can tell, are pretty much free to do what they want with these tools.
I do follow up on cases, I'm not supposed to participate in court but I can contribute community impact statements about systemic patterns I've observed. I haven't so far ever seen one of the cops in front of another court for this behavior, even when it was clearly documented by an order of protection being granted in DV court.
I assume this problem is far far worse than I can perceive. Victims will only bring this to court with a lot of support and clear evidence, and even then with the offender being police, it's risky and frightening. Our police are automatically placed on administrative leave if served an order of protection, so the local judges are extremely resistant to ever actually granting one.
I fill out a form for each session and case and write descriptive notes about what happens in court, including things like language and tone of the judge, conduct of the counsel, etc. I don't evaluate "questionable" myself and I do nothing personally with the notes. They are submitted to the organization and eventually in aggregate make their way into data used by researchers, journalists, law schools, legislators.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193593234
If you build it they will come.
For example, I have no problem with people recording in public a news cast, or even taking down a sick trick on a skateboard, but I think generally people would say ' a camera that tracks my movements' violates my privacy in some way, even though I understand someone theoretically could post agents on every block and do so
Also, local psycho cop incidents seem to be on the rise. Last year a veterinarian and her bf were murdered by her ex (a state trooper) that blew his brains out after[1]. Just a month ago next town over one of the officers was arrested for placing tracking devices on his ex. [2]
Around a decade ago I was harassed through the mail after a road-rage incident (plainclothes dude ran up to my car window after I parked to go to gym and claimed I cut him off, said: 'I'll remember you, you should be more careful'). He ran my plate and sent a vaguely threatening anonymous letter to my car's registered address. I opened a case with the Somerset County prosecutor's office of internal affairs. The prosecutor's office claimed there were no hits through the federal NCIC system, but in-state there was no audit log of plates checked through NJMVC, and even if there was a smart cop (or MVC employee, lots of people have access to it) could just ask a dispatcher to run it over the radio. They claimed that this system was getting moved to the New Jersey State police and it was expected this would have an audit log. So no resolution there, I found out who the guy was years later by chance when I saw him writing parking tickets and got his name off a ticket. I informally reported it to prosecutor's office at this point and they said something to the effect of 'Yeah, nobody likes the parking enforcement guy, if he pulls shit like this again let us know and we'll put an end to it'
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/08/06/us-news/screaming-and-gunshots...
FTFY.
>>Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired.
Ah, so then they just resumed another law enforcement job in the next town over like so many do, whose investigations into their criminal activity was terminated because they resigned, and because they were never charged or fired, then they have a clean record to apply elsewhere.
Nice it was highlighted but the big question, will something be done about this ? I think we all know the answer to this.
The only surprise is "14 times", I would expect hundreds of times.
