Police officers have repeatedly been accused of using Flock Safety’s license-plate surveillance network for personal reasons. Now Flock says new safeguards will make that abuse harder—but would they have stopped the cases we already know about?
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Haines City Police Officer Christopher Goodson allegedly searched for his estranged wife’s vehicle 717 times using Flock. Former Pasadena Police Sgt. Michael Palitz was accused of using the system to track a female coworker before resigning. Similar concerns have emerged elsewhere, including the previously reported Coweta County audit.
Flock has announced new safeguards, including:
🧾 Required case codes 🤖 Automated auditing and proactive lockouts ⏳ Seven-day default data retention 🔐 New data-sharing controls
But requiring an officer to enter a justification is not the same as verifying it. Shorter retention does not prevent current monitoring. Sharing controls do not necessarily stop an insider who already has access.
In this story, we test each safeguard against the alleged misuse cases and ask the question Flock’s announcement does not fully answer:
Case number and warrant number should also be required (until we can make these cameras illegal or just run them out of town on a rail). Anyone can fabricate a reason for that silly text box. But a case number has a paper trail and so does a warrant.
