Texas Police Used 83,000+ Flock Cameras to Hunt Down A Woman Who Had An Abortion
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In May 2025, an officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas ran a license plate search across 83,000+ Flock Safety cameras spread over 6,800+ different camera networks nationwide. The search log, per court records, was “had an abortion, search for female.” He used this system to access cameras beyond Texas state lines and into states like Washington and Illinois where abortion access is protected by law. He was hunting her.When the story broke via 404 Media and the EFF, the Johnson County sheriff brushed it off and told reporters it was a “welfare check.” He claimed he was worried the woman was bleeding to death and just wanted to find her. That’s the story you’re going to see around to defend the search. That story is a lie.Subsequent reporting from the EFF, drawing on court records and affidavits, shows exactly what happened. The abortion happened TWO WEEKS before the search. That’s hardly the timeline to report a “medical emergency”. And let’s say you truly were worried for someone’s health, you would call a hospital.Deputies had opened a “death investigation” involving a “non-viable fetus.” which is clearly not a wellness check. They had collected evidence from the woman’s home, including medication packaging and photos. The photos and the tip came from a man described as her “romantic partner”. Yes that’s correct, her partner turned her in. On the same day as the Flock search, deputies were on the phone with the local District Attorney’s office asking whether they could charge her with a crime.No charges were ever filed against her and she was not located by Flock cameras. What the search accomplished was creating a paper trail proving Texas cops are willing to hunt a woman across state lines for a legal medical procedure, and lie about it when they were caught.Flock Safety is a private surveillance company and you’ve probably seen its cameras sit on poles at intersections, in parking lots, near businesses, and in some neighborhoods. Every camera photographs every license plate that drives past it, along with a timestamp, location, and often the make, model, and color of the vehicle. Flock stores that data for 30 days on rolling storage (or more but I found 30 days in my research). Every plate is indexed into a nationally searchable database, which is accessible by any of the over 4,000 law enforcement agencies with Flock access.Any cop with a Flock login, in any state, can search the network.The Institute for Justice has documented at least 28 cases of officers using Flock or similar license plate reader networks to stalk personal acquaintances, mostly ex-partners and current partners the officer wanted to control.
The more I read into the specifics, the sicker it made me.In Sedgwick, Kansas, Police Chief Lee Nygaard used Flock over 200 times in four months to track his former partner and her new boyfriend. He lost his certification. In Milwaukee, Detective Josue Ayala used Flock 124 times to find his romantic partner and 55 more times to track her ex. In Joplin, Missouri, one officer ran a single woman’s plate roughly 400 TIMES.
In Florida, an officer checked for his girlfriend’s plate 70 times over seven months, then sat outside her workplace in his patrol car.They marketed this technology as something that’s supposedly for women’s safety, but in reality it’s being used to stalk and harm them.Texas has about 9,500 Flock cameras. I don’t even know how many are actually country wide at this point but some sites have the number in over the hundreds of thousands.
And what are they being used for? To hunt down a woman. To let cops stalk ex-girlfriends. To let ICE track undocumented families. We have missing children in every state in this country. There are unsolved rape cases stacked up in evidence rooms. There are violent men who have restraining orders against them driving to the addresses of women who filed those restraining orders. If Flock actually worked to find abducted children or to catch violent offenders, I know we would be hearing about their accomplishments regularly.Texas can’t stop school shooters, but Texas Republican leadership has managed to build a network that can hunt one woman across several states. Priorities.Meanwhile the country has an entire vat of Epstein files with named people in them who spent years abusing women and children, and not a single Texas law enforcement resource has been used to pursue any of them.I would love to hear a Republican elected official explain why the party that “wants government out of your business” has spent the last four years building the largest surveillance state in America. Why the party that spent decades warning us about “communist China that tracks your every move” has literally built that infrastructure to a pole at every DFW intersection.Total surveillance for women, immigrants, and the poor is exactly what they’ve wanted.Now that I’ve probably given you a bit of anxiety, let me give you some good news. Cities are catching on. At least 30 U.S. cities have ended their Flock contracts since early 2025 after learning how the searches were being used. Austin has ended its Flock program and San Marcos let its contract lapse. Multiple Central Texas cities are rethinking whether to renew and we need to push them to NOT renew.Meanwhile, Harris County is currently considering Amendment 253, which would expand Flock deployment county-wide. Multiple North Texas jurisdictions are still adding cameras. Every one of those additions puts more residents in a database that a Texas sheriff, a cop stalking his ex, or an ICE agent can query without a warrant. This is what happens when private companies sell surveillance to local government without a regulatory framework.Israeli spy SUVs sweeping every phone in range. Paxton using an anonymous email to jail a Houston midwife. Flock cameras hunting a Texas woman who left the state. Different technology. Same architecture. Ideological policing against citizens while ignoring actual violent crime is their game plan.1. Read the original reporting so you can share it with anyone who tries to tell you this didn’t happen. 404 Media broke the story. EFF has the court records and the welfare-check demolition. The Institute for Justice’s ongoing case count on cops stalking women through Flock is public.2. Find out if your city or county has Flock cameras and you can do so by asking your city council. If your city has them, ask for the contract, the audit log for search queries, and the retention policy for the data. Every city has the power to end its Flock contract. Austin and San Marcos did. Yours can too.3. If you live in Harris County, show up at commissioners meetings on Amendment 253. County-wide Flock deployment isn’t “safety.” It is a national database that any officer, in any state, can query about you without a judge signing off on it.4. On November 3, vote Gina Hinojosa for Governor against Greg Abbott. Vote James Talarico for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton. Vote Vikki Goodwin for Lieutenant Governor against Dan Patrick. The Texas Attorney General’s office is the state agency that has weaponized every one of these surveillance tools against Texans. Change who holds that office. Register at votetexas.gov by October 5.5. Send this to a Texas woman. Send it to a Texas man who has a daughter, a sister, a wife, a friend who has no idea they are being stalked by the state. We are building this platform exactly for moments like this. Where a marginalized group suffers harm and finds no media platform to help raise awareness. Our commitment to justice and human rights calls on us to demand accountability for every person in this country. If in your means, join us as a paid subscriber and help us continue to build a future where every person has equal access to fairness and justice.See y’all tomorrow.No posts