An Indiana county prosecutor has charged five current and former Indianapolis police officers with fraud and misconduct for abusing the city’s Flock Safety automated license plate readers. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department announced Wednesday that an internal audit of the department’s ALPRs found that five officers misused…
Page A3From§Eachthe early evening edition — 23 September 2026
Flock skips Senate hearing on cameras already caught tracking an ex-girlfriend 3,000 times.
As it ran on the front
The Wrecking Crew got the callout Wednesday, same as everyone else watching C-SPAN: a Senate Judiciary subcommittee had titled its hearing "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network," invited the CEOs of Flock Safety, Axon, Motorola and Verkada to come explain the network, and the CEOs did not come. Senators from both parties unloaded anyway, into an empty row of chairs.
They didn't need the witnesses. The charging documents were already sitting in two other jurisdictions, doing the explaining for free. In Albany County, a 13-year veteran sheriff's investigator, Laurie Moore, is accused of running searches on an ex-partner's license plate roughly 3,000 times, plus four more plates hundreds of times each. In Indianapolis, an internal audit turned into fraud and misconduct charges against five officers who ran the department's own automated readers the same way — on people, not on threats. That's the demo the CEOs skipped giving.…
…(cont) Here's the part that makes this a job and not just a headline: the fix was already built before the hearing started. On September 3, three weeks ahead of the no-show, Rep. Thomas Massie filed the Flock-Off Act — a funding valve. It cuts off federal money for any municipality that buys, installs, maintains, operates or upgrades an ALPR or biometric camera network. That's the shutoff switch, machined and filed, sitting in committee since the day it was introduced.
Florida didn't wait for Washington to turn its copy on. On August 31, the state's own transportation office revoked local police access to license-plate readers on state highways — one segment of the same network, unbolted by a state agency using authority it already had. Not a bill promising a fix somewhere down the road; a fix, already thrown, on a live system.
So the wreckage here isn't the cameras — it's the excuse that nobody knew how they'd be used. The subcommittee called the hearing "Always Watching" and then watched an empty panel; the docket in two counties was already watching back, showing exactly who gets tracked when nobody's required to answer for the network. The Flock-Off Act has been sitting in the same committee for three weeks, unopened, next to a hearing that just proved its own case for it. Florida already showed the switch works. The rest of the machine is filed, dated, and waiting on the same senators who spent Wednesday asking questions the docket already answered.
“Congress holds a hearing called "Always Watching" and the camera companies skip it, because they already know how it works — ask the Albany deputy who ran the same ex's plate three thousand times, or the five Indianapolis cops running that exact play. Congress wrote the off-switch three weeks ago, the Flock-Off Act, and it's sitting in a committee drawer while your plate gets logged every time some cop's stalker app decides you're worth watching. That's not a privacy debate, that's a stalking tool with a subcommittee.”
“These are AI-powered public-safety tools helping departments close real cases — you don't blame the technology because a couple officers misused it, that's a personnel matter, not a product recall. And the CEOs skipping the hearing, that's just scheduling, it's not like all four of them ducked the same subpoena on the same day — well, four CEOs, one hearing, zero chairs filled, okay, that one does sound bad when I say it out loud.”
The receipts
Senators from both parties unloaded Wednesday on AI-powered automatic license plate readers capable of tracking people’s every movement, criticizing the likely infringement on privacy rights as the “surveillance network” faces backlash from communities across the country. Sen.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) invited the CEOs of Flock Safety and other prominent AI-powered surveillance camera manufacturers to testify before the upper chamber's Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism next week. Hawley, the subcommittee's chair, wrote on social media Friday that he “invited the CEOs of Flock Safety, Axon…
A Senate panel held the first Congressional hearing Wednesday on AI-powered surveillance cameras manufacturers, such as Flock Safety, in an attempt to "get to the bottom" of whether the technology infringes on the public's privacy. The hearing — titled "Always Watching: Flock's Nationwide AI Surveillance Network" — was spearheaded by…
· Massie unveils Flock-Off Act aimed at restricting surveillance cameras from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· NY sheriff’s investigator allegedly used Flock cameras to track ex-girlfriend thousands of times from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· Florida bans Flock and other license plate readers from state highways as backlash grows from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.