He Watched the Cops Back

[chars 1350]

There's an eye on a pole at the end of your street, and it never blinks. It reads your plate every time you pass, logs the time and place, and keeps the receipt. That's an automatic license plate reader, or ALPR. Flock Safety alone has more than 120,000 across the U.S., according to YouTuber Anthony Sistilli.

Sistilli, who lives in Canada where the cameras are popping up too, flipped it. He coded his own ALPR that only tracks police cars. On Sept. 20, around 11:37 a.m., two officers showed up at his front door.

Privacy for me, not for thee

The officers asked what he wanted with a database of police cars. One said how scary it would be if people could figure out where officers live, when their shifts start and what they do all day.

His answer was perfect: "I think that's the exact same concern" regular people have.

That's the whole movie. The people running the cameras get nervous the second the lens points back at them. And the abuse isn't hypothetical. Sistilli points to an officer who ran 25,000 searches on his ex-girlfriend and her family, and an officer who chased a woman down the highway, nearly causing a crash, to pull her over and ask her out.

The people running the cameras get nervous the second the lens points back at them.

The bug that wasn't a bug

Sistilli dug into Pflugerville, Texas. A resident requested the audit logs showing who searched the city's camera data. Ugly answer: more than 459 outside agencies had access. Of about 1.6 million searches, only 3% came from Pflugerville itself. Their own party, and they barely made the guest list.

Flock told the city it was a bug. The city manager had crews bag every Flock camera in town before the council even voted.

Then California. Richmond council member Sue Wilson told Sistilli their police chief shut the cameras off in 2025 on learning the city's data was shared way beyond Richmond, despite being told it wasn't. One back-end setting, she said, "was not dialed to the right place."

The twist: Richmond's council still voted 4 to 3 to bring it back. Every horror fan knows you don't go back in the house.

Do the cameras even work?

To be fair, a study Sistilli cites found cities with Flock cameras had about 11% less vehicle theft, and solved around 16% more of the thefts that did happen.

Then it gets murky. An Institute for Justice lawyer told Sistilli the study overblows the benefits. In Richmond, Wilson says police claimed a 30% car theft spike after the cameras went dark, but the same data showed bigger spikes while they were on.

The sales pitch is its own horror movie. 404 Media found a leaked Flock training guide that teaches police to sell city councils. The gist: if a politician says no to cameras and a crime happens, it's the politician's fault. The ACLU of Massachusetts' Kade Crockford calls that the Willie Horton effect. And the search logs? Lisa Femia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says officers have typed reasons like "LOL," "LMAO" and "IDK." Your whereabouts, searched for the vibes.

Sistilli also says Flock employees once pitched with a live feed of a children's gymnastics class at a community center. That city still renewed.

Is there one on your block?

The source doesn't cover Ventura, Santa Barbara or SLO counties, so we won't pretend. But every 805 driver should ask: is there a plate reader on my commute, and who gets to search it?

Find out. Sistilli points to DeFlock, a public map of camera locations, and Have I Been Flocked, which checks if your plate turned up in a search. Or do what that Pflugerville resident did: request your city or county's audit logs. If your council votes on cameras, pull up to public comment and ask: Who can search it, how long is it kept, and who checks the log?

Want more stories on who's watching and who's paying? Open the new issue of Connxct Magazine.

Sources

I Built My Own Flock Camera. Then Police Came to My Door. (Anthony Sistilli)

The claims in this piece come from Anthony Sistilli and the people he interviewed in the video above. Check your own city's records before you share.

Watch the full video