Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’
The EFF found cops writing “idiot,” “WEIRD KID,” "blah," "leave me alone," and button mashing in Flock's 'reason' box.
Last summer, a police officer in Lake County, Indiana, used Flock’s surveillance search engine to scan the license plates from over 19,000 cameras located in more than 1,500 cities and towns. The officer claimed the reason for this search was “LMAO.” This is just one of the countless instances where law enforcement officers have used Flock’s database without providing any legitimate justification, as found by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in a recent analysis.
The EFF obtained these records through public government requests, revealing that countless officers have searched the Flock database using reasons like “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” “Haha,” “idk,” “blah,” “TBD,” and even bizarre phrases like “robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone.”
The searches have been performed by officers from various police departments across the country between 2023 and late 2025, as Flock altered its “reason” box functionality. Critics argue that such casual and frivolous searches of a powerful surveillance system undermine civil liberties and foster a culture of unrestricted access to citizens’ location information.
The EFF argues that when law enforcement and tech companies market ALPR technology to city councils, they present it as an essential tool for solving serious crimes, yet the reality shows that these same officers are often not held accountable for their actions when using the technology. In response to the EFF’s analysis, some police departments acknowledged investigating the officers who performed these “joke” searches, while others stated they would take disciplinary action.
The Fishers Police Department in Indiana revealed that a detective who used “blah” as a reason for searching was doing so only when he had issues with the technology, while another department defended the use of a search where the officer wrote “driving around being weird” as a legitimate public safety measure. Nevertheless, the EFF stresses that mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, especially when those with access to such sensitive data treat it with such casual disregard.
Written by urgent.news from 404 Media's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
