Both of them typed a reason. The system wrote it down.

Two license plate cases landed eight days apart this month, and the detail that connects them is not the one getting quoted.

On August 3, Mauldin, South Carolina fired an officer for running a former partner's plate through the Flock system 166 times between March and July. That officer was the fifth law enforcement employee in Greenville County fired over Flock misuse in two months. Five, in one county, in two months.

On August 11, an officer in Haines City, Florida was arrested for entering his estranged wife's plate 717 times over 21 months. The affidavit says he went to a supervisor's house and explained it as keeping track of where his kids were.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. Both of them entered a justification for every single search. Mauldin's officer selected warrant check, traffic infraction, welfare check. The Florida officer picked Criminal Motor Vehicle Offense, Wanted Person, Drugs/Narcotics. Neither of those was true. The system recorded them faithfully anyway.

I spent 21 years in law enforcement. I have typed a reason code into a system more times than I could count.

So let me say the fair thing first. A required reason field is real friction. It stops the casual look-up. It creates a record. It is better than nothing and I would rather have it than not.

It is also an attestation, not a fact. It records what the searcher typed. It cannot record why they searched.

On August 13 Flock announced a set of changes, and I want to give credit where it is due, because the response was fast and most of it is substantive.

Audit assistance, introduced about four months earlier, becomes mandatory for all law enforcement customers by the end of this year. Case codes, optional since July 2025, will be required on every search by the same deadline, with an emergency bypass that flags exigent searches for review. Default retention drops from 30 days to seven, though existing customers keep the periods they already have. Multi factor authentication became mandatory at the start of this month, and Bishop Fox is running an independent security assessment with findings due in September.

That is more movement in eleven days than most of this industry manages in a year, and it happened ahead of any statute requiring it. I do not think that is nothing.

But the control everyone is quoting from that list, the mandatory case code, is the one both of these officers already worked around. They had a reason field. They lied in it. So the question I am sitting with is not whether Flock did something. They did. It is what a reason field is actually for, and what we think it proves.

Which brings me to the thing that actually caught one of these cases.

The Washington Post investigation on August 2 found at least 50 officers charged with or accused of misusing plate systems, with 26 of those cases involving wives, girlfriends, exes, or women they wanted to meet. The story opens on a woman whose ex, a police chief in the Atlanta suburbs, had looked up her and her daughter roughly 600 times. She did not learn this from an internal audit. She did not learn it from the vendor. She found out through a website called Have I Been Flocked, which is built from Flock audit logs that local governments released through transparency portals and public records requests. It was put together by a guy in Dunwoody, Georgia who got suspicious and started filing open records requests.

So the log worked. It just worked from the outside.

That is the question I cannot get past. Who is an audit log for?

I did not think to ask it for twenty one years.

There are three possible answers and they produce three different products. Build it for the vendor and it is anomaly detection. Build it for the agency and it is a discipline record. Build it for the person in the log and it is a notice. Nearly every system I have ever touched in this industry is designed for the first two. The third one is what caught the chief, and it only worked because one state's public records law happened to reach those logs, and because a volunteer did the work.

The accountability we are all pointing at right now is load bearing on a FOIA request. That seems fragile to me, and I would like to be wrong about it.

I will say the fairest thing I can about the new controls. The one I find most interesting is not the one in the headlines. Flock also added a proactive lockout that suspends an account automatically when it detects abnormal search behavior, pending administrator review. That is the control aimed at the actual failure mode here. A person entering a plausible reason 717 times over 21 months is a pattern, even when every individual entry looks fine. I genuinely do not know how well that works, whether it will catch a patient person, or how many false suspensions a department will tolerate before someone turns the threshold down. I would like to see the numbers. Nobody has published any.

One more thing happened in the same four weeks. I am not sure yet what to make of it. On July 9, ONVIF put out a release candidate for Profile V, its cloud video profile, and made the Security Add on mandatory for any conformant product. OAuth 2.0 for authorization, recordings encrypted before they go to cloud storage. A standards body and a vendor, four weeks apart, working on versions of the same question: the system has to be able to say who was allowed to ask.

And closer to home for me, Salt Lake City is drafting an ordinance that would require a case number tied to a criminal case for every plate search, ban facial recognition outright, and bar the technology being used against people exercising their First Amendment rights. The public hearing is September 15.

One line in that draft is the reason I am writing any of this down. The police department would have to run quarterly audits, and those audits would be subject to Utah's public records laws. Read that next to the Georgia case. The thing that caught the chief was an audit log a member of the public could reach, and Salt Lake City is proposing to make that reachability a requirement instead of an accident. I do not know if it survives to a vote. I will be reading it, and I expect it will teach me more about how this works in practice than any product announcement will.

I do not have a framework for you and I am not telling anyone what to demand. I have a question I cannot answer.

If you have built one of these systems, or bought one, or audited one: who did you design the log to be read by? And has anyone ever built one meant to be read by the person inside it?

Teach me something in the comments. I will be there.