[moshun]

My only question is why you didn’t believe police could/would do this in the first place? My default perspective is that this is exactly what law-enforcement and other government officials would use this technology to do, especially if there are no guardrails or laws preventing them from abusing it.

[vlod]

I kinda expect the s/w engineer who wrote this would create an audit log. i.e. police-id, licence-place-id.

Well that's the way I would write it.

[ceejayoz]

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...

> While Flock’s audit logs have been successful in bringing to light certain abuses, that very fact is likely to deter many officers from honestly describing the purposes of their searches moving forward. Take the controversial Texas abortion search. If the officer who logged, "had an abortion, search for female" had just left out the word "abortion” that story never would have seen the light of day. And there’s no doubt that the department — and police around the nation — realize that.

https://footnote4a.org/news/secret-searches-part2

> Our ability to identify officers was clearly effective. In a direct attempt to stop us from providing transparency, Flock and police departments have dropped the unique IDs (UUIDs) in the transparency portals entirely. They now simply replace them with the word “redacted” in the public audit logs, effectively preventing oversight and individual accountability.

> Flock Safety updated the system on 12/11/2025 to protect officer safety and active investigations, Network Audit Logs no longer include officer names, license plate, or vehicle fingerprint information.

[kentm]

Audit logs are only useful if they are used to action abuses. The issue is that police departments protect abusers due to the “thin blue line” mentality.

[Zigurd]

I'm sure there is an audit log. But because, you know, computers, they'll probably charge you a few thousand dollars to process the FOIA request. If you could get the time cards and GPS tracks from police departments, how much detail and overtime fraud do you think you would find?