Notes ·
Flock Has Already Become a Police Stalking Tool
In Fort Bend County, a sheriff’s lieutenant searched for a woman’s license plate more than 148 times between 2022 and 2025. The searches were unrelated to official police work. The woman discovered them herself through Have I Been Flocked, a service built from audit records obtained through public-records requests. The lieutenant reportedly received a two-day suspension.
In Pasadena, a police sergeant resigned after being accused of using Flock to track and stalk another officer. A Baytown officer also resigned while internal affairs, police, and the Harris County District Attorney investigated alleged misuse of the system.
These are not isolated hypothetical scenarios.
The Institute for Justice has now documented at least 28 cases where officers allegedly used automated license plate reader systems to follow current partners, former partners, coworkers, or strangers they were interested in romantically. Most of the cases occurred since 2024, and the organization believes its list is almost certainly incomplete.
One Georgia deputy allegedly searched for a woman’s vehicle 1,639 times. A Milwaukee officer allegedly searched for his partner and her former partner nearly 180 times. Another Florida officer searched for his former girlfriend and members of her family more than 100 times.
Flock argues that every search is attached to an individual user, permanently logged, and available for agency review. It has also introduced an Audit Assistance tool intended to flag suspicious patterns. The company says publicly reported misuse is rare compared with more than 140,000 monthly users across thousands of agencies.
But an audit log is not protection when nobody reviews it.
The Institute for Justice found that only a few of the 28 known cases were initially discovered through internal investigations. Most became known only after victims reported the officer’s wider behavior or investigated the surveillance themselves.
That is the problem with describing Flock as merely a collection of license plate snapshots. A single image may record only a car passing one location. A searchable network of those images can reveal where someone sleeps, works, shops, worships, receives medical care, spends the night, and whom they visit.
A plate is not a person, but a history of that plate’s movements becomes a remarkably detailed history of a person.
Flock’s safeguards may help prove abuse after it happens. They do not prevent an authorized officer from searching someone for personal reasons, and they do not protect a victim who has no idea that the searches are occurring.
Access to this kind of movement history should require more than an officer entering a reason into a form. Person-specific searches should require a warrant or meaningful independent approval, and agencies should be required to proactively audit unusual searches rather than waiting for victims to discover them.
When a system makes stalking this easy, the misuse is not separate from the architecture. It is a predictable consequence of collecting everyone’s movements and making them searchable.