Parts 1 and 2 of this series covered what Clay County has paid Flock Safety and what the equipment does. Part Three covers how law enforcement is abusing Flock's network and how easily bad actors can access its cameras and data.
Across the country, officers with access to Flock’s network have been caught using it to track women they were romantically interested in.
Independent security researchers say the cameras themselves can be broken into in under a minute. Both problems were the subject of a U.S. Senate hearing this week, and both are directly relevant to the roughly 220 Flock devices now under contract in Clay County.
The Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that has sued Flock on Fourth Amendment grounds, maintains a public database of documented cases.
As of this month, it lists 244 separate incidents nationwide, and the organization says that number likely understates the real total, since it only captures cases serious enough to end in firing, resignation, or arrest.
A Pattern Of Officers Using The Network To Stalk Women
The pattern repeats across states and departments, month after month.
In Indianapolis, prosecutors charged five current or former police officers this week with fraud and official misconduct after finding they used the department’s Flock system to track people not suspected of any crime, including former romantic partners and women they met on patrol.
One of the five, an eighteen-year veteran named Jonathan Schultz, was also charged with two counts of stalking after allegedly telling a woman he was an FBI agent and following her. A separate officer in the same case allegedly looked up his ex-wife’s car location more than 950 times in six months.
Kechi, Kansas, a police lieutenant pleaded guilty to computer crime and stalking after using Flock cameras to track his estranged wife.
In Jerome County, Idaho, the sheriff himself used the system to search for his wife’s vehicle hundreds of times; the state attorney general found no crime had been committed, but he retired two years before his term ended.
Richmond County, Georgia, three sheriff’s deputies were arrested after allegedly misusing the system more than 100 times each, and a separate former deputy there was arrested for allegedly searching for a woman he was having an affair with 1,639 times.
Milwaukee, an officer resigned after allegedly using the network to track a romantic partner and one of her exes nearly 180 times over two months. The detective assigned to investigate that officer’s misconduct was later charged himself, after allegedly using the same system to track two other people for a year.
Menasha, Wisconsin, a different officer was charged with misconduct after his ex-girlfriend filed a complaint alleging he had used Flock cameras to track her.
Lufkin, Texas, an officer was indicted on 100 felony counts after allegedly searching for his ex-girlfriend and people she knew more than 10,000 times. The department disabled all of its Flock cameras afterward.
Habersham County, Georgia, a deputy was fired and criminally charged after an internal audit found he used the system to track a person he was in a relationship with, prompting the sheriff’s office to tighten its Flock use policy.
Bibb County, Georgia, three former deputies were charged with stalking in a single scandal.
A federal class-action lawsuit filed in August, Schulte v. Flock Group Inc., accuses the company of failing to safeguard its system against this kind of misuse despite knowing about it.
The suit points to a separate finding that some officers retained access to Flock cameras even after being fired from their departments, because multi-factor authentication on accounts is optional rather than required.
A Flock executive confirmed this to reporters, saying MFA “is on by default for all of our customers, but they can choose to opt out of it if they so choose.”
Flock’s own public response has been to describe the abuse as rare. The company told 404 Media it is “aware of 15 incidents of abuse” and that with 140,000 monthly active users, “the relatively rare instances of abuse, while obviously wrong and awful, are exactly that, rare.”
The company added that its system logs activity, which is how it catches misuse after the fact.
A Cluster Of Cases In Florida
The pattern is not confined to other states. At least a dozen documented cases have surfaced at Florida agencies, several in counties bordering Clay County’s own coverage area.
Volusia County, a Flock capture misidentified Lindsey Isaacs’ vehicle in a fatal Interstate 4 crash, leading to her wrongful jailing for 13 days. Her case is covered in detail below.
Port St. Lucie, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper was arrested after sending Flock data and license plate photos over Snapchat to others.
Indian River County, a sheriff’s sergeant was placed on leave after a reporter asked the department about possible Flock misuse.
Brevard County, a former deputy previously named the department’s Deputy of the Year resigned after an investigation uncovered what officials called “egregious misconduct,” including looking up an ex-girlfriend’s plate on Flock.
Sumter County, a detective was fired and criminally charged after using Flock and other police databases to track her husband’s ex-wife; the sheriff there suspended the county’s entire Flock camera network in response.
Niceville, a former officer pleaded no contest after an internal audit found he used Flock to track another officer and that officer’s spouse.
Fort Pierce, an officer was charged with four database-misuse felonies after allegedly tracking an ex-girlfriend hundreds of times, a case that came to light only after a media outlet contacted the department.
The same pattern, misuse surfacing only once a reporter asked, repeated in Sarasota, where a former officer was fired and arrested after looking up a plate hundreds of times for personal reasons.
Haines City, an officer was arrested after searching Flock for his estranged wife’s car more than 700 times over roughly two years.
Orange City, an officer allegedly used ALPRs to stalk his girlfriend and her family members more than 100 times over seven months.
Key West, a sheriff’s deputy allegedly used a license-plate-reader system to track and eventually pull over a woman he had met while providing security on a television set.
These documented cases in a single state are, on their own, a reasonable basis for CCSO to be asked directly whether it has ever audited its own account access for the same pattern.
Wrongful Stops At Gunpoint From Misread Plates
A second, distinct category of documented harm involves the technology working exactly as designed and still producing a dangerous mistake.
In Toledo, Ohio, a camera misread a “7” as a “2,” leading officers to detain an innocent driver at gunpoint, deploy a police dog, and jail him for hours.
In Morristown, Tennessee, a misread “O” as “0” led to grandparents being held at gunpoint while their three-year-old granddaughter watched from the car.
In Detroit, a misinterpreted alert led to an innocent woman being detained at gunpoint with her autistic child placed in the back of a squad car, and her vehicle impounded for weeks. The city later settled a lawsuit.
In Espanola, New Mexico, a misread digit led to two sisters being detained at gunpoint, and a separate incorrect entry in the same jurisdiction led to a teenager being held at gunpoint.
In Sherwood, Arkansas, a single misread character led an innocent couple to be ordered out of their car at gunpoint.
In San Diego, a misidentification jailed an innocent man for nearly a month over a crime he was five miles away from at the time it happened.
A Business Insider analysis of Roseville, California’s system found Flock sent 1,427 theft or felony alerts to police over two years, and 71 percent of them involved an incorrect plate read.
A Florida Case Now Before The U.S. Senate
The clearest example of what can go wrong sits close to home. Lindsey Isaacs, 23, of Palm Coast, spent 13 days in jail on eight felony charges, including three counts of vehicular homicide.
She was charged after a Flock camera search pointed investigators toward her SUV following an October 2025 crash on Interstate 4 that killed three people, including a Flagler County deputy administrator and his wife.
Multiple 911 callers had described the suspect vehicle as a maroon Dodge Durango with a partial plate. Isaacs owned a black Durango. According to her attorneys, investigators pursued her vehicle anyway, and a later examination found no crash damage. Prosecutors dropped the charges and arrested a different driver.
Isaacs testified this week before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, at a hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” She is not suing Flock itself.
Her attorneys argue the camera worked exactly as designed, accurately logging her vehicle’s location. Their lawsuit instead targets the Florida Highway Patrol investigators, accusing them of ignoring evidence and misusing the data to force an arrest.
“I came here today because I want you to understand that surveillance technology does not exist in a vacuum,” Isaacs told the panel. “Information collected by technology can become part of an investigation that affects a real human being.”
Her case makes a point worth sitting with for Clay County specifically. The technology can perform exactly as advertised and still produce a wrongful arrest, a 13-day jailing, and a lawsuit, once the data reaches investigators willing to read it selectively.
Researchers Say The Cameras Themselves Can Be Hacked In Under A Minute
The same Senate hearing featured testimony from Benn Jordan, a musician and independent cybersecurity researcher who spent much of 2025 investigating Flock’s hardware and software.
Jordan testified that, working with security engineer Jon Gaines, known online as GainSec, he identified 55 separate security vulnerabilities in Flock’s systems.
Jordan’s video on the subject, titled “We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in Under 30 Seconds,” demonstrated a physical exploit. Flock’s cameras run on Android. Pressing a specific, undisclosed sequence of buttons on the back of a unit creates an open Wi-Fi hotspot.
From there, anyone nearby can connect, enable developer access, and gain what Gaines described as essentially full control of the device. The cameras also have exposed USB ports, meaning a small malicious USB device disguised as a keyboard can be plugged in to run commands automatically.
Jordan separately found that some Flock Condor cameras, the pan-tilt-zoom video units, were broadcasting live and archived footage directly to the open internet with no password required. In one recorded instance, Jordan located a camera, remotely zoomed in on a stranger’s phone screen as the man paused on a bike path, and read what was displayed.
He also found that Flock’s cameras store sensitive data, including photographs, license plate information, system logs, API keys, and passwords, in ways that were not adequately protected. That research led him to Flock law enforcement accounts for sale on a dark web marketplace, which he traced to a Russian vendor.
Gaines, describing his broader findings on a security podcast, said the vulnerabilities include remote code execution flaws serious enough that an attacker within wireless range could potentially interact with a camera’s systems without ever touching the device physically.
Flock has publicly disputed the severity of Jordan’s findings. In one video, Jordan used a compromised camera in Brookhaven, Georgia, to record himself reading Flock’s own denial statement back into the camera it was describing.
Jordan has said his goal is not to end the technology but to force independent, third-party security audits of surveillance vendors, comparing the idea to routine health inspections. “My big compromise that I’ve been proposing is to just have an independent security audit of any surveillance vendor,” Jordan said.
What This Means For Clay County
Nothing in this piece alleges that a Clay County Sheriff’s Office employee has misused the Flock system, and no CCSO-specific case appears in the Institute for Justice’s public database as of this writing.
What is documented is this. Clay County has committed to roughly $897,500 a year across at least 16 contracts covering more than 220 Flock devices, including the same Falcon and Condor camera lines Benn Jordan’s research found vulnerable.
The cameras are running on the same FlockOS platform that has produced at least 244 documented cases nationwide, twelve of them in Florida alone, of officers using it to track people they had no legitimate reason to track.
CCSO has not disclosed whether it requires multi-factor authentication for its own FlockOS accounts, what its internal usage audit policy is, or whether it has ever reviewed any account access for misuse. Those are direct, answerable questions this outlet has now put to the department.
Okay, let's dive into the numbers stated above a little deeper. 244 nationwide cases, seems small overall. But wait, those are the ones where people were fired, charged or had to resign. Best I can tell, it doesn't capture the cases where LE members were caught, but those things didn't happen. Maybe they got a slap on the wrist, reassigned to another department or whatever. We don't know that number. But let's also check the numbers again and see how many times these folks actually abused the system before they got caught. Some hundreds of times and some even into the 1000 marker.😟 Now let's just wonder for a minute, how many times is it being abused, where LE members don't get caught...obviously that number is probably huge too right? I mean these folks that did get caught have abused it over and over and over again before someone noticed them or cared to notice them. I bet the number is in the 10,000's nationwide. I bet there are people in larger dept that from time to time use the system for an unauthorized look and see. I hope I'm totally wrong about this, because if I'm not, we'll soon see Accident Attorneys coming off billboards and Civil Rights Attorneys replacing nationwide.