Flock enabled nearly 3,000 police searches in a month, then its CEO denied the one about an abortion.

…(cont) Go back to August 26. 404 Media had reported that police used Flock's system to track someone who had self-administered an abortion. Asked about it, Flock's chief executive, Garrett Langley, told police the story was "entirely false." 404 Media's follow-up reporting states plainly that he was not telling the truth. This is not a dispute about tone or emphasis. It is a company's chief executive describing, to the police who are his customers, an event his own product logged.

Three weeks later, on September 17, Flock ran a different kind of search — through its own fake account, posing as a police department. The searches: "coexist bumper sticker." "White truck with a Trump sticker." "Star of David." Not a live investigation. A demonstration, apparently, of the kind of query a department should not run. The company that built the tutorial on restraint is the company whose chief executive, three weeks earlier, could not accurately describe how the tool had actually been used in a case involving a pregnant person.

Now return to row one. Nearly 3,000 searches, one month, one Long Island. No breakdown yet of what was searched for, or why, or whether any of it resembled the queries Flock itself flagged as the wrong kind. The log exists. The company holding it is the same company that, when a real answer mattered, gave police a false one.

Point, counterpoint: the departments paid to install a system that grades their restraint in public demonstrations while its own leadership fails the same test in private. The invoice went to the counties. The accuracy, on the one search that counted, did not.

The file with the search count and the file with the CEO's denial arrived from different reporters on different dates. They describe the same company. Nothing here requires speculation about what happens next. Row one already tells you what happened this month.