Knock LA84%
Does Flock Safety Keep Women Safe? 86%
By Jayme Kusyk98%
6/15/2026, 4:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 35 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Appeal to Emotion, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 33% saturation with 569 hits. Analysis detected 4,128 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,725 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 78.1% and a BS Rank of 86% (3,124 of 21,769 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 85.70% of the article peer group.
In case you haven’t heard: LAPD is collaborating with Flock Safety, a company that makes AI-powered Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs).
ALPRs record over 450 photographs per automobile per year in the City of LA, cataloguing vehicles and their locations by license plate, model, make, color, bumper stickers, scratches, and other features including the likenesses of any human beings standing nearby the vehicles in question.
If you own or use a car, your movements are tracked on a more-than-daily basis and are made available to LAPD officers who can search for your plate number or other potentially incriminating details (whether you’ve ever worn a cowboy hat for example) on Flock’s phone app, instantly accessing all the point-in-time images that archive your patterns of transit.
Does this tech almost sound like it was designed in order to facilitate interpersonal exploitation and abuse?
Cops across the country seem to think so since they keep using Flock to stalk their exes.
A Wisconsin police officer looked up his then-girlfriend’s license plate 124 times in two months, apparently cross-referencing her location with that of her former partner whose plates he searched 55 times during the same period.
Another Wisconsin cop was accused by an ex-girlfriend of using Flock to track her location.
Incidentally, a restraining order in a separate domestic abuse case was recently filed against this same officer.
In Costa Mesa, a police officer used Flock to track a woman he was seeing and her other romantic partners, and a Riverside County sheriff, who was later arrested for kidnapping his ex-fiancée, used the department’s Flock system to track one of her friends.
A sheriff in Florida employed ALPRs to track and pull over a woman he had interacted with on one random prior occasion.
After locating the woman via ALPRs, he blasted through a no-passing-zone at 70 mph to catch up with her, and later referred to her as “a shiny thing” who was “teasing” him.
The Chief of a Kansas Police Department searched his ex and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times in four months, drove his department-issued car to follow and confront them, and allegedly only ever used the city’s Flock cameras for this purpose.
These are just a handful of stalking cases enabled by Flock, more of which continue to break the news on a near-monthly basis.
Given LAPD’s culture of rampant domestic and sexual abuse, the department is probably due for an ALPR-related lawsuit soon.
(Former LAPD Assistant Chief Al Labrada might have found Flock a bit more convenient than the AirTag he secretly installed in his girlfriend’s car).
It’s a matter of time before your tax dollars are funding the legal defense of the next cop who mobilizes for Intelligence/Surveillance/Reconnaissance on the girls’ trip to Palm Springs.
Meanwhile, it’s not just the objects of officers’ personal infatuation who are harassed by Flock Safety.
Queer, trans, and birthing people who come to California from states that criminalize gender-affirming care and abortions are also victimized by ALPRs despite multiple laws that supposedly preserve their right to privacy.
California police are explicitly forbidden from sharing data related to reproductive healthcare with out-of-state law enforcement, even in the event of a subpoena.
Even so, in 2023 over 70 CA departments illegally disclosed people’s driving patterns to states that criminalize abortion.
Several years and lawsuits later, a minimum of 35 police departments are still flagrantly, illegally sharing data.
Of course such unlimited intra-national surveillance exposes trans people and abortion seekers to prosecution and brutality in their deep-red states of origin, but this gender-based violence isn’t the unique purview of Republicans and misogynistic police departments.
By welcoming surveillance into their cities, Democratic politicians not only enable but zealously encourage these ALPR-powered witch hunts.
Mayor Karen Bass, outgoing City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, and the vast majority of LA City Council members proudly claim to be pro-choice—and yet these party-line-toeing Democrats continually approved LAPD’s partnerships and contracts with Flock and other ALPR providers, year after year.
This is how the City’s liberal officials like to honor their pro-choice values: by throwing abortion seekers to the far-right wolves.
Such girlbossing is a staple characteristic of Los Angeles Democrats, who are well-versed in using ALPRs to attack LA’s most vulnerable, under-resourced women: street-based survival sex workers.
The City, County, FBI, and DHS are conspiring on the so-called “Figueroa Corridor Human Trafficking Initiative,” which dangerously and nonsensically conflates human trafficking with consensual sex work.
It is an excuse to give LAPD even more armaments and impunity to arrest, assault, and murder both consensual sex workers and human trafficking survivors which is, in turn, an excuse to gentrify Figueroa Street ahead of LA’s forthcoming hosting of the World Cup, Superbowl, and Olympic Games.
Integral to this crusade is the “Dear John” operation, a strategy to intimidate people whose plates have been snatched by ALPRs in transit along Fig, by sending ominous, implicatory letters to their homes.
The City Attorney’s office flaunted one of these letters—which bears Karen Bass’s name, as well as the Police Chief’s —at a public presentation earlier this year.
The letter reads, “A vehicle registered in your name was observed in an area where residents have expressed concern about crimes…including prostitution.
The LAPD wanted…to remind you, it is illegal to engage in or solicit prostitution.
The consequences for engaging in such illegal conduct may result in criminal punishment by jail or fine.”
Over 2,000 of these letters have been sent, and every one of them poses a disastrous threat to the folks who work on Figueroa.
Any reputable study of the “end demand” policing model of prostitution will thoroughly debunk deterrent tactics, proving them to be both ineffective and dangerous.
Criminalization does not reduce demand.
Furthermore, it increases the probably that clients will perpetuate violence against sex workers, as buyers tend to become more volatile and aggressive when they feel frightened or suspect they are being watched.
Rather than surveillance and police presence, street-based sex workers have long called for safe, permanent housing, healthcare, and no-strings-attached cash, requisites that make all women more empowered and autonomous.
The City throws millions into LAPD’s contracts with Vigilant, Axon, and other ALPR providers, then dares to claim that those cameras protect the citizens whose extreme poverty and precarity is in fact caused by the government’s obscene misallocation of resources.
How might the lives of LA’s 14,000 unhoused women and girls be transformed if they were allocated even a fraction of the $8.2 million LAPD spends every single day?
This was the question posed by members of the Skid Row-based Downtown Women’s Action Coalition (DWAC) at a recent meeting of the LA Board of Police Commissioners.
Referencing DWAC’s 2026 Women’s Needs Assessment, in which women living in Skid Row identified police harassment, stalking, and brutality as the top harms in their lives, Lateecia Frederick noted that many women in her community are “fleeing domestic violence, often relying on anonymity and mobility to survive.”
Frederick said in the meeting that tools like Flock “make it easier for abusers or the state to locate vulnerable women.
You cannot claim to care about survivors by building infrastructure that tracks their movement.”
Shameka Foster, also from DWAC, reminded the Board that “Black women have always been coded as suspicious in this country.
Our presence in public space has always been criminalized.
When you track movement patterns in over-policed neighborhoods, you are reinforcing racial profiling with technology.
We do not need predictive policing…we need housing, accessible healthcare, fresh food programs, centers for mothers and children.”
It should be noted that in any meaningful statistical sense, ALPRs simply do not solve crime.
According to LAPD’s own latest Technology Report, only 0.026637578% of their 1.132 billion annual license plate detections actually assisted with open investigations.
Meanwhile, Flock’s website brags about the “Predictive Analytics” that Foster condemns.
“Leveraging historical incident data, AI can predict areas or times of increased risk,” the company’s website reads.
Flock is not intended to solve actual, executed crimes but rather to predict, or more accurately invent, criminality in geographic areas already deemed criminal, then assign guilt to those already presumed guilty by the state.
As Foster says, ALPRs are particularly lethal to Black women, especially trans Black women, whose bodies are perpetually suspect for their deviance from a compliant white, cisgender norm.
So too with unhoused femmes and sex workers of all ethnicities and genders, who have always been automatically read since before the invention of license plates as dysfunctional degenerates, whose very existence menaces the sanctity of patriarchal society.
This is why the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition advocates to build power, not paranoia, in our fight to shut down Flock.
Yes, it’s an unprecedented, dystopian infringement on your right to privacy, but there is nothing ideologically new about this tech.
It is just the latest weapon in an old war which, by the way, we are winning.
As scandal after scandal hits the news, Flock has been forced to issue worthless, mewling statements that only further discredit their product.
LAPD is scrambling to conceal their involvement with the company, frantically yet vaguely assuring the press that new ALPRs they’re purchasing “won’t be Flock cameras,” but are “something entirely different.”
There is nationwide momentum in the campaign against Flock, as cities across the country continue to cancel their contracts.
The question is not if, but when we rid LA of this affront to human dignity and life, what else can we dismantle?
For what further victories can we mobilize?
Which other instruments of the architecture of surveillance can we abolish and replace with systems that are community centered and led, that permanently fulfill the needs of women who live and work on Figueroa, on Western Ave, in MacArthur Park, in Skid Row?
Regardless of your relationship to privacy, policing, or power, those needs are your needs, too.
Our survival, autonomy, and liberation are all interconnected.
Join the fight.
<em>The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a Skid Row-based community group building power to abolish the surveillance police state.
To get involved with our work, you can sign our petition to Shut Down Flock, follow us on Instagram, attend our general meetings on Tuesdays at 6pm at the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) or on Zoom, or show up with us at the Board of Police Commissioners’ weekly meetings at LAPD HQ.</em>
Analysis
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