Flock CEO Compares Police Stalking Exes To Cop Checking Daughter's Boyfriend's Criminal Record (Public Report)Javascript is disabled. Enable javascript to view IPVM.<br>Contact us at info@ipvm.com for help.

Flock CEO Compares Police Stalking Exes To Cop Checking Daughter's Boyfriend's Criminal Record<br>IT

IPVM Team<br>•Published Aug 14, 2026 19:38 PM

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Flock CEO Garrett Langley has spent months under pressure as documented cases of police misusing his company's license plate reader network have multiplied. In an Aug. 13 USA Today interview, he reached for an analogy to describe it:

It is, a cop checks his daughter's boyfriend's criminal record. It is, a cop checks ex-partner's location.

Both are instances of officers misusing law enforcement access for personal purposes, and that much is accurate. But placing them in the same sentence, as equivalent examples of the same underlying misconduct, works to excuse what documented Flock abuse actually looks like and obscure Flock's own role in enabling it. Cases of officers using Flock to stalk ex-partners have been surging: new arrests, terminations, and investigations are surfacing across multiple states, with fresh incidents reported nearly every day. A Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) arrest of a police chief for stalking multiple individuals, a detective running 179 unauthorized searches on two women, an officer who ran 600 queries on an ex-partner and her teenage daughter — these are what the analogy was standing in for.

Executive Summary

Langley's analogy is a deliberate strategy: frame Flock misuse as one tile in a mosaic of police database abuse that long predates Flock. The two examples he chose do share a category — unauthorized personal use of law enforcement access. But the analogy massively understates the severity of what the documented cases show, and papers over Flock's own specific accountability failures that made the abuse possible at scale. Criminal records are largely public; Flock location data is not. Checking a boyfriend's record is often protective in motive; tracking an ex-partner across months is predatory and actionable in real time. Flock reconstructs a physical life in a way no static record can. Now, facing that surge, Flock is finally making its audit safeguards mandatory. But how well the new tools will work, and what abuse they will miss, remains an open question, particularly without a warrant requirement.

No Response from Flock

IPVM reached out to Flock for comment on Aug. 14, 2026, and did not receive an immediate response. This post will be updated if a response is received.

The Analogy and Its Argument

Langley's daughter-boyfriend comparison reflects an argument he has made across several outlets: that police systematically abuse their tools, and that Flock is simply the system now surfacing it. To Newsweek on Aug. 13, he said:

Police abuse was here 20 years ago, and we think that the problem is no one else is shining the light on what law enforcement does.

On TBPN the same day, he said:

Lo and behold, law enforcement abuses their power at times. And that's horrible, right?

The comparison does not hold against the conduct it was meant to represent.

The Access Distinction

Criminal records are largely public. Court filings, arrest histories, and conviction data are available through state court websites and commercial background check services accessible to any civilian. A cop checking his daughter's boyfriend's record through a law enforcement database is reaching something civilians can reach through slower channels. The privileged access adds speed; it does not add a capability that otherwise does not exist.

Flock location data is different in kind. Real-time vehicle tracking across a network of 120,000 cameras in 49 states is exclusively accessible through law enforcement credentials. No civilian equivalent exists. When an officer queries an ex-partner's vehicle, they access a capability the target cannot reach, cannot audit in real time, and cannot defend against. The two are not comparable in what the misuse actually enables.

The Intent Gap

The construction of Langley's analogy is as telling as its content. He did not reach for a neutral example. He chose the most emotionally sympathetic possible framing: a father, a daughter, protective instinct. He placed it first, then paired it with checking an ex-partner's location, presenting the two as the same category. They are not.

The documented Flock abuse cases are not protective in motive. A Georgia police chief was arrested for using the system to stalk and harass multiple individuals; he died by suicide before standing trial. A North Carolina officer tracked her boyfriend's ex-wife 31 times, including twice while off duty, entering fabricated justifications into the system to obscure the searches.

An Arizona officer resigned after using Flock to track his own wife and asking...