Build the Database and It Will Be Abused

Every argument for Flock cameras assumes the people searching the database are honest. Here is what the record shows happens when they aren’t — and who catches them.

In April 2026, the Institute for Justice published a study documenting at least 18 cases of officers using license-plate readers to stalk romantic interests. An Orange City, Florida officer ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate at least 69 times — and her mother’s 24 times, and her father’s 15 — before he was arrested. The police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas used Flock to track his ex and her new boyfriend more than 200 times. In February 2026, prosecutors charged a Milwaukee officer who ran 179 searches in two months tracking a woman he was dating.

The detail that should worry you most

Almost none of these cases were caught by the system’s own safeguards. They surfaced because victims noticed — an ex who kept appearing where she’d just driven, a colleague who saw the searches happen. The audit logs Flock points to as accountability recorded every abusive search faithfully, and flagged none of them. An audit log nobody reviews is not a safeguard. It is a diary of abuse, read only after the harm.

Now look at our county’s audit

New Hanover County’s Flock network was searched roughly 2.98 million times in sixteen months. When we obtained the audit through a public-records request, the county redacted the name of every searching agency and every officer. So ask the question this page forces: if a police chief in Kansas could run 200 stalking searches before anyone noticed, what exactly would catch the same behavior here — where the public isn’t even allowed to know who is searching? Not one wrongdoing is alleged; that is the point. Nobody can check. A database this powerful, with oversight this thin, doesn’t require bad intentions to produce abuse — it only requires time. See the record for yourself, then tell the commissioners to cancel it.