The Dallas Police Department announced Tuesday that it will shut down hundreds of Flock cameras after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) directed state agencies to halt funding for the automated license plate readers, citing concerns over privacy and Fourth Amendment rights. “Three hundred twenty-one Flock cameras currently supported through…
Page A3From§Eachthe noon edition — 2 September 2026
Texas Police Used AI To Justify Tracking An Abortion Patient By Flock Camera; The Fix Was Defunding
As it ran on the front
Follow along, everybody — the document's short, and it does the joke for us. Line one: a Texas police department needed a report explaining why it ran a woman's license plate through a Flock camera network while she was, per filings elsewhere this year, seeking an abortion. Line two: rather than write that report themselves, officers used an AI tool to draft it. All together now — that's a machine writing the justification for a machine watching a body cross a county line. Nobody involved seems to have found that arrangement remarkable enough to slow down for.
Enter Congressman John James, of Michigan, a different Flock market entirely, offering the discourse a word it apparently needed: 'balance.' Balance, he says, is the key — not a moratorium, not an audit, not a subpoena for who pulled that plate and why, just balance, the political equivalent of asking a smoke detector to also not go off so much.…
…(cont) And here's where the document does its best work: it never mentions balance again, because the state of Texas didn't reach for it either. Governor Abbott paused the funding. Not the practice — the funding. Dallas responded to the money drying up, not the misuse being confirmed, by switching off hundreds of the cameras. Read that order again, slowly: the cameras that tracked a woman seeking a legal medical procedure did not get shut down because of what they were used for. They got shut down because a check stopped clearing.
This reporter has read a great many government documents in which the fix and the failure never once make eye contact, and this is a clean specimen. The AI wrote the alibi. The congressman supplied the vocabulary. The governor found the valve, and it was the water bill, not the water. Nobody had to admit the system did the thing it was accused of doing; the invoice took care of accountability instead, the way invoices do, when nobody wants to write the other kind of report. All together now, one more time — line 47 is the funding line, not the surveillance line. That's the whole document.
“They didn't turn the cameras off because a woman got hunted down over a medical decision, they turned them off because the check bounced — that's the whole confession, sitting right there in the invoice. Balance is what they call it right before they defund the outrage and keep the surveillance contract for next fiscal year.”
“Look, 'balance' means we're for accountability and for public safety, both, that's not a dodge, that's a coalition. The funding pause is a fiscal decision, totally separate from any operational review, which, to be clear, hasn't found anything wrong, because nobody's finished looking, which — okay, I've said 'looking into' twice today, that's not a pattern, that's coincidence.”
The receipts
The incident shows how quickly police departments have come to use AI surveillance tools even in critically sensitive cases.
EXCLUSIVE — Rep. John James (R-MI) defended Flock cameras Wednesday but said their use needs guardrails to protect privacy, telling the Washington Examiner that “balance is the key” as the issue becomes a flashpoint in the 2026 elections.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.