Katie Pavlich put it on the table Friday night, and the quote that stuck was not some campus activist chanting about Big Brother. It came from criminal defense attorney Jacqueline Goodman, who looked at Flock Safety’s nationwide license-plate web and said what a lot of elected conservatives have been circling for months.
This is very, very anti-democratic…. there is no oversight.
That is the argument now. Not whether cops should catch car thieves. Of course they should. The argument is whether a private Atlanta company gets to assemble a searchable map of where ordinary Americans drive, keep it in the cloud, and let tens of thousands of officers query it without ever bothering a judge.
Pavlich’s NewsNation panel sat Goodman next to Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Ross Teeple, the lawman who already answered that question with a contract cancellation. Teeple once sold the cameras as a public-safety win. Amber Alerts. Silver Alerts. Human smugglers. Then he looked harder at what the hardware can actually do.
You start developing enough information on someone that it becomes a warrantless search, that’s where our concerns are.
He told supervisors he would not renew. The deal dies at the end of September. Roughly 200 Flock units sit across Pinal County. The sheriff’s decision hits the cameras his office controls in unincorporated areas. Cities like Maricopa and Casa Grande still have their own contracts. Flagstaff, Sedona, Chandler, and South Tucson have already walked. A sheriff who swore an oath to the Constitution decided the oath outranked the vendor.
That is not a slogan. That is a man in a cowboy hat doing what too many city managers will not.
Twenty Billion Scans a Month and Nobody Voted for It
Flock Safety now boasts more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The company works with thousands of agencies. The pitch is stolen cars and missing kids. Fine. Then the network grew into something else.
Officers can search not only a plate but a color, a dent, a bumper sticker, a kayak in the bed. Data hops from one department to another through statewide and national lookup toggles that cities sometimes did not even know were on.
Audits in places like Dayton, San Francisco, and Ventura County found outside agencies, including federal ones, querying local cameras by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. Flock insists it has no ICE contract and that localities control sharing. The logs keep embarrassing that talking point.
Sen. Josh Hawley opened a formal investigation on August 26. His letter to CEO Garrett Langley put the constitutional problem in plain English. Americans do not surrender their privacy when they drive to work, drop their kids at school, or go to church. Congress never authorized this industry-built web. The company’s internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguard for hundreds of millions of people.
Rep. Greg Steube said the quiet part. We are not the CCP. We are not 1984. Americans have rights. Rep. Keith Self of Texas filed the PRIVACY Act to force federal agents to get a warrant before they query these systems. Tim Burchett and Thomas Massie are in the same fight. Even Ron DeSantis called the technology out of control. When Hawley, Massie, and a Florida governor sound like the same choir, stop pretending this is a left-wing tantrum.
The Dirty Cop Problem Is Not a Hypothetical
Flock will tell you the cameras solve a million investigations a year and find thousands of missing people. Grant some of that. Then read the charging documents.
A Milwaukee officer used the system 124 times to locate a romantic partner and 55 times to locate that partner’s ex. A Richmond County, Virginia, deputy allegedly queried a woman 1,639 times. Savannah fired employees and made arrests. Georgia officers got walked out after audit tools caught them. The Institute for Justice has counted more than two dozen cases of cops resigning or getting arrested for stalking people through Flock.
The company answered the scandal the way Silicon Valley always answers a scandal. Shorter retention. Seven days instead of thirty. Mandatory audit flags. Case numbers on searches. All of it still leaves the same hole. Any officer with a login can type a plate, type a fake case number, and reconstruct a life. There is still no warrant. There is still no judge. There is still a private firm holding the keys.
Courts have split. Some judges treat a single plate photo on a public road as no search at all. Civil-liberties lawyers point to Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling that a comprehensive, retrospective record of movement is different in kind from a cop noticing a car on the street.
The Supreme Court has not decided an ALPR case. Until it does, your rights depend on which circuit you live in and how many poles your city rented.
That is not law. That is a lottery.
Safety Is Not a Blank Check
Law and order is not the same thing as a national panopticon. A plate reader aimed at a known stolen car is police work. A cloud that can tell an angry boyfriend, a rogue detective, or a future administration everywhere you went last week is a different animal.
The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment because they had already met the general warrant. They did not need a TED Talk to understand the danger of a government that records first and invents a reason later.
Scripture is older than the Bill of Rights and just as clear about who keeps the books. Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. Psalm 146:3.
A vendor policy is not a prince you can vote out. It is a terms-of-service document with a sales team.
President Trump said his stance is under review. Good. Review it against the text, not the brochure. If the tool needs a warrant for a week of cell-site pings, it needs a warrant for a week of every driveway in America. If a sheriff in Pinal County can see the line and step back, Congress can see it too.
Catch the thief. Find the child. Then go to a judge like every other serious search in this country. The camera on the lamppost does not get a special exemption because the company printed “Safety” on the box.
