Texas Police Used 83,000+ Flock Cameras to Hunt Down A Woman Who Had An Abortion

SubscribeSign in

Texas Police Used 83,000+ Flock Cameras to Hunt Down A Woman Who Had An Abortion<br>Flock cameras are being used by stalkers.<br>Jul 28, 2026

283

26<br>182

Share

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.<br>Let's Address Texas is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

The “welfare check” defense

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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>What Flock actually is and how it works

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.<br>Any cop with a Flock login, in any state, can search the network.

Let's Address Texas is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

Cops keep using Flock to stalk women

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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Let's Address Texas is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe

We have missing kids, violent men are on the loose, but Flock seems to be mia for all of that

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...