The operational story here isn’t that cops write bad reasons into a search log — that’s been documented for a year. It’s that Flock Safety just changed the mechanism that made those reasons visible at all, and did so under the banner of reform. Before late 2025, officers querying Flock’s ALPR network had to type a free-text justification, which is how EFF’s public-records analysis caught entries like “LMAO” (Lake County, Ind.), “sexy” (Norton, Mass.), and more than 6,300 searches logged simply as “TBD” across 30-plus agencies, including 1,954 from Priceville, Ala. alone. After the update, officers pick from a pre-populated dropdown — “Traffic infraction,” “Other” — in about half a second. EFF reports that audit logs matching the pattern it studied have dropped sharply since early 2026. That’s not accountability; it’s the same unaudited access with a cleaner interface.
That distinction matters more than any single absurd log entry, because it goes to who controls the evidentiary record in a fight that’s now playing out in courts, statehouses, and city councils simultaneously. San Jose fired an officer in April, per East Bay Times reporting published September 11, 2026, for using Flock to track a woman who had accused his cousin of domestic violence — a case the department’s own chief says state law doesn’t clearly criminalize, because California’s confidential-database statute doesn’t cover ALPR data. That gap is precisely the terrain CalMatters describes lawmaker Sabrina Cervantes trying to close with SB 1013, over opposition from at least 39 law enforcement groups that have spent $5.6 million lobbying since 2000. Meanwhile the Security Industry Association is fighting to keep warrant requirements off the table entirely, arguing, as Biometric Update reported, that a camera recording a plate on a public road isn’t a “search” — a framing IPVM disputes by pointing to a network of more than 120,000 Flock cameras capable of reconstructing a driver’s pattern of life.
A dropdown menu doesn’t add oversight — it removes the only evidence that oversight was missing.
For the data-and-surveillance beat, the tell is that Flock’s fix improves uniformity, not verifiability: the system still doesn’t check whether the selected category matches the actual purpose of the search. That’s the same design failure as the free-text field, just harder to audit. Watch three things next: whether California’s SB 1013 or similar bills anywhere mandate case-number-linked, machine-checkable justifications rather than dropdown categories; how the Fourth Circuit rules in the Schmidt v. City of Norfolk case testing whether Flock’s network density triggers Fourth Amendment protection; and whether any state actually criminalizes unauthorized ALPR access the way San Jose’s chief says he now wants, closing the gap that let his own fired officer avoid prosecution.
When confronted with these flagrantly unserious searches, police departments offered a mix of bureaucratic deflections and excuses… Fishers Police Department (Ind.) said that the detective that searched for "blah" has done so "when he has issues with the technology" and that the term "is used when he is actively using the technology to solve a criminal case, and the technology is not moving fast enough for him."
