Well, color me completely unsurprised. A Mauldin, SC police officer has been caught using the city’s Flock Safety license-plate cameras to track a former romantic partner 166 times over five months. Ellie Anna Hammond, a 24-year-old officer, got the boot on August 3 after separation papers filed with the state academy detailed her industrious daily searches of the ex’s plate. She logged them under creative official-sounding excuses like “Warrant Check,” “Traffic Infraction,” and “Welfare Check.” The lieutenant who wrote it up noted, with admirable understatement, that those justifications were never the “real reason.”
One search a day, every day, from March through July. Dedicated. Methodical. Exactly the kind of public-safety work taxpayers expected when they started paying for these little cameras that watch every car that rolls past.
This is the part where the Flock defenders usually clear their throats and launch into the greatest hits. So let’s give them the floor they so richly deserve.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley has spent years assuring everyone that the company has been “thinking about privacy for the last nine years.” Frankly, I suspect he’s spent more time thinking about all the money he will make by convincing more local governments to scatter his little spy-cams all over town. I don’t know about you but when a company puts a word like “safety” in their name, you know they are all about doing the right thing.
Langley loves to point to the audit log that requires officers to type in a reason for every search. Look how well that worked. Hammond typed in reasons. The system dutifully recorded them. The audit log performed its sacred duty of creating a nice paper trail of the stalking. Mission accomplished. The feature designed to prevent abuse instead produced a perfect documentary record of the abuse. After all, it “only” took five months to uncover the abuse. Surely not enough time for the unstable officer to use the ill-gotten info to do something nasty to her ex if she was so inclined Bravo, Flock, Bravo!
Then there is the famous claim that Flock does not track people, only vehicles. This is a favorite. License plates are public, after all. The cameras only photograph cars on public roads. They cannot possibly be used to follow a human being around. Except, of course, when an officer decides the human being they want to follow happens to drive a car. Then the system becomes an extraordinarily convenient personal tracking network. But remember: it is still just tracking a vehicle. The distinction is important if you are writing marketing copy.
I guess it’s not just South Carolina, surprise!
Supporters also insist that any misuse is “isolated.” The South Carolina Sheriff’s Association helpfully issued a statement on the very day Hammond was fired, reminding everyone that isolated misconduct should never be mistaken for evidence that the technology itself is improper. This was roughly three months after two Greer officers, less than twenty miles up the road, were fired for doing almost exactly the same thing with the same cameras. Isolated cases are apparently occurring with impressive geographic consistency in South Carolina. At this rate the isolation is starting to look more like a feature than a bug.
And let us not forget the ultimate fallback: if the audit logs catch the bad apples, that proves the system is working. Langley himself has pointed to previous cases where the logs identified officers stalking partners and called it evidence of accountability. By that logic, a burglar alarm that only rings after the house has been emptied is a triumph of security technology. The logs did their job. They documented the 166 searches. Hammond got fired. The cameras remain in place. Everyone wins, except the person whose movements were being monitored by a jilted officer with a badge and a password.
The company continues to insist that local agencies own the data, that Flock does not sell it, that retention is usually only thirty days, and that the whole network is simply a tool for solving real crimes. All of which may be true in the narrowest technical sense. None of it prevented an officer from treating a taxpayer-funded surveillance grid like a personal relationship-management app. The guardrails that were supposed to make this different from ordinary mass surveillance turned out to be more like decorative fencing.
So here we are again. Another South Carolina department. Another officer. Another ex. Another set of falsified search reasons that the system happily accepted. The cameras keep multiplying. The talking points stay the same. And the only people who seem genuinely shocked are the ones who still believe the marketing.
You know what I wonder about? The incidents like this that we don’t hear about when a police chief or sheriff decides to sweep it under the rug and give the offending employee a break because they like them or whatever. I suspect incidents of abuse like that are a lot more common than the public realizes.