They gonna ram it in. They create the problem to solve the problem. Boy oh boy they getting creative on those camera tricks.... @1:49... constitution be damned... there is nothing good left in the USA... nothing but a zombie corporation ran by pdfiles. We are slaves no doubt about that. It is like us plebs get no chances but the corpos get infinite forgiveness.

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Be safe out there. People on instagram, even if well intentioned, are not your friends

My town is having a council meeting on monday, open to the public. Looking for any advice or specific things to bring up if I get a chance to speak my mind.

Cross posted from https://mander.xyz/post/55420709

...more Atlanta News First Investigates identified at least 19 Georgia cases in the past year involving alleged personal searches, including accusations of stalking. MORE ON THIS INVESTIGATION: atlantanewsfirst.com/2026/07/17/ai-audit-tool-flags-suspicious-police-searches-flock-misuse-cases-mount-georgia

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A Pasadena police sergeant has resigned from the department while he remained under an active internal investigation, according to the Pasadena Police Department.

PASADENA, Texas – A Pasadena police sergeant has resigned from the department while he remained under an active internal investigation, according to the Pasadena Police Department.

The resignation comes as a Pasadena city council member exclusively told KPRC 2 that the sergeant was being investigated for allegedly misusing the department’s Flock Safety license plate reader camera system to track a fellow officer.

For months, KPRC 2 has been looking into allegations surrounding Sgt. Michael Palitz after receiving information about an internal investigation. As part of that reporting, KPRC 2 requested Palitz’s personnel records, receiving a heavily redacted file, and continued pressing city officials for answers.

During a Pasadena Civil Service Commission meeting in June, KPRC 2’s Rilwan Balogun spoke with Police Chief M.P. Jackson about the ongoing case after encountering him at the meeting.

When asked whether Palitz had been suspended after KPRC 2 submitted public information requests, Jackson said, “I don’t think the two are connected,” but declined to discuss the pending investigation.

“I can’t really discuss pending cases,” Jackson said.

When asked if there was anything else he could share, Jackson responded, “No, sir.”

Council member details allegations

Pasadena City Council Member Emmanuel Guerrero told KPRC 2 he believes the investigation centered on allegations that Palitz improperly accessed the city’s Flock camera system to monitor another officer.

“Based on what we gathered, [he] was using our camera system, our Flock system, to track and stalk a female officer,” Guerrero said.

When asked to clarify whether he was alleging Palitz was under investigation for misusing the Flock camera system and stalking a fellow officer, Guerrero responded, “correct.”

Guerrero said his understanding is that the system itself flagged repeated use of the account.

“To my understanding, it was an overwhelming use that the system itself flagged and notified that account associated to the officer,” Guerrero said.

KPRC 2 has not independently verified the specific allegations discussed by Guerrero, and Pasadena police have not publicly released details of the investigation.

Department confirms resignation while investigation continues

In a statement to KPRC 2, Pasadena Police Sergeant April Ontiveros, with the Administration & Media Relations Unit, confirmed Palitz resigned while the investigation remained active.

“Yes, he resigned while under investigation,” the statement said. “Regardless of his employment status, our investigation will continue in accordance with legal requirements until it reaches its conclusion. Additionally, our department does not release information on open/active personnel investigations to protect the integrity of the investigation.”

Palitz’s resignation does not end the department’s internal investigation, according to the department.

Questions about use of surveillance technology

Flock Safety describes its cameras as investigative tools designed to identify vehicles, not people.

According to the company:

“A Flock camera is a license plate reader camera built to identify vehicle details that may help generate investigative leads. That includes the license plate, along with attributes like make, model, color, and other visible characteristics. Flock cameras are not general-purpose surveillance systems designed to identify people. They are built to focus on the vehicle involved in an incident and the details that can help distinguish it from other vehicles on the road.”

Guerrero, who said he supported implementing the Flock system, said the allegations concern him because of the trust residents place in law enforcement.

“The people put their confidence in us to utilize systems that could support and protect the way of life, and to use it against certain individuals is a betrayal of our community’s trust,” Guerrero said.

KPRC 2 is not aware of any open criminal investigation or whether any case has been presented to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

KPRC 2 sought responses from city leaders

KPRC 2 reached out to Sgt. Michael Palitz on Friday seeking comment regarding his resignation and the allegations surrounding the investigation. As of publication, he had not responded.

KPRC 2 also emailed Mayor Thomas Schoenbein and city council members Bianca Valerio, Emmanuel Guerrero, Pat Van Houte, Jonathan Estrada and Dolan Dow seeking comment because they served on the city council in 2025 when Palitz was suspended and later returned to duty.

Council Member Pat Van Houte was the only person, other than Guerrero, to respond.

“I had not heard about this. The last I heard was two days ago, and Sgt. Palitz was still an employee at that time. I am not in a position to have the details as to why the sergeant resigned. I checked with the Mayor and he said your best contact would be Police Chief M.P. Jackson.”

[Orange County] - Cops across the Golden State accessed the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s (OCSD) Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) system at least 145 times to track protesters within the span of a year and seven months, newly obtained data shows. Eleven California police agencies, one as far as Daly City, located almost 400 miles away, searched for protesters using OCSD’s Flock data, which contains license plate numbers, timestamps, locations, and photos of vehicles and their surroundings. The majority of the dates that police searched for people landed directly on or around dates when protests against ICE were held. The data was shared with Inadvertent by a local anti-ALPR organizer, who obtained it through a public records request with the help of Oakland Privacy. The data, officially called a network audit, is a log spanning approximately 19 months that shows other agencies’ individual queries of OCSD’s Flock. The records provide a snapshot of how police have been using Flock’s powerful mass surveillance system on the public — without the public’s consent.

On and around June 14 last year, officers from Anaheim Police Department (APD), San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, Riverside police and sheriff’s agencies, Daly City Police Department, Salinas Police Department, and the California Highway Patrol looked for people who were involved in protests using Flock’s powerful search features, such as license plate lookups or a freeform-AI-powered search. The features enable anyone with access to the Flock system to look for people who are in view of Flock’s pervasive camera systems. Flock’s AI-powered system allows cops to search for specific identifiers on vehicles or people.

The reasons for the searches, cited by officers, are contained in the log. They are unspecific and include “protest”, “ICE PROTEST”, “gene autry protest” and other vague terms. Cops are required by state law to list the reason for searching through the Flock system, but the data shows that even beyond tracking people engaged in First Amendment activity, police have been logging their reasons using vague one-word responses. The most specific search for protesters read “Hit and run protest,” logged by the Riverside Police Department.

...

Outside of the mid-June 2025 searches, officers continued to provide little details about their reasons for scouring the Flock system for protesters. One agency, Escondido Police Department, queried the Flock system at least 28 times on February 2 last year for “Protest ATI Vehicle” and “Immigration Protest.” These searches line up with several arrests that followed a protest against ICE terror in Escondido on that date.

“Protest is a common one. Protests, protesters,” said Ed Vogel, a member of DeFlock who researches ALPR usage across the country, when asked about police using ALPRs to search for protestors.

“It’s another example as to how surveillance like ALPR, not just ALPR, but surveillance is a symptom of a crisis of democracy,” Vogel added.

...

The revelation of OCSD’s Flock network having been used to surveil protestors comes after President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive that criminalizes dissent in the United States. Recently, anti-ICE protestors in Texas were handed lengthy prison sentences for their participation in a noise demonstration outside of an ICE detention center in Prairieland, Texas. One individual, who was not even at the protest, was sentenced to thirty years for moving a box of zines.

“Surveillance shows a crisis of democracy by, one, how these technologies are procured. Oftentimes it’s done behind closed doors, oftentimes it’s done without fully disclosing information to the public or to elected officials,” said Vogel, “There’s very little public engagement around whether we should enter into a contract, no real democratic process around the signing of the contract, or asking around, ‘Is this the community we want to build? Is this public safety?’”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/71819282

For use only on private property you have a legal right to access.

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The ACLU documents how an automatic license plate reader company has lied about its operations, signaling a need for reputable governments to avoid working with Flock Safety.

During a city council meeting in a suburb of Wisconsin in April, the city of Oshkosh considered whether it should approve a contract to use automatic license plate readers (ALPR) from Flock Safety, a prominent company that provides ALPRs to law enforcement agencies across the country. During the meeting, one city council member asked Flock if the company’s ALPR system created heat maps that could reveal where a particular vehicle had driven over a period of time. Flock’s chief information security officer, who was in attendance, told the council that Flock’s system did not “create a pattern or heat map of an individual’s movement” through the tracking of their vehicles. At the end of that meeting, the Oshkosh City Council approved a contract with Flock. The very next morning, the city learned that Flock had lied.

...

The company has demonstrated a pattern of treating legitimate operational questions and concerns not as problems to be solved, but rather as mere public relations issues.

In Colorado, Loveland Police Chief Tim Doran raised concern that federal agents were accessing the town’s ALPR data. Flock responded by telling the chief that federal agencies no longer had access to Loveland’s license plate readers, and had their CEO reiterate to the press that federal data sharing was a non-issue because Flock had no federal contracts. After contradictory information later came to light, the company was forced to admit that it did, in fact, have contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security (DHS) for pilot projects that gave those agencies direct access to license data. “We clearly communicated poorly,” Flock’s CEO said, acknowledging that Flock’s “public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information.”

...

Flock knew that, despite not being a customer, ICE had indirect access to Flock’s data and system through the company’s state and local law enforcement customers. The issue was never about having direct access to Flock’s data, it was about having any access to the data. But rather than address these data security and control issues on their merits, Flock released a misleading blog which reads as an attempt to confuse the public and create a false sense of security among its potential government customers. Ultimately, Flock was forced to accept that its denials were simply not credible. The CEO admitted Flock was used for immigration enforcement but argued that such matters were not Flock’s problem.

...

While Flock claimed its new oversight tool would “significantly” reduce the risk of improper uses like abortion enforcement, in reality the tool doesn’t work. As an investigation by our colleagues at the ACLU of Massachusetts found, Flock network audits showed police frequently enter vague terms like “investigation” or “susp” instead of information about the substance of the investigation into the search reason field. In September 2025 alone, a local Oregon police department was allowed to search Flock’s ALPR system after entering “investigation” into the search reason field 111 times and “hehehe” into the field on 20 occasions, which demonstrates how easy it is to search Flock’s system while avoiding security-triggering words like “abortion.” Flock certainly would have known, if it conducted even a rudimentary test of its system, that the search field’s protections were extremely simple to circumvent. Nevertheless, Flock’s financial interests appear to have been better served by the company misrepresenting the efficacy of its security features to the public and its potential government customers.

...

Flock has even made false claims to the public and elected officials about working with the ACLU. Earlier this year, after the ACLU of New Mexico and Flock supported the same state-level ALPR legislation — albeit for very different reasons — Flock’s Senior Director of Public Affairs took to social media to claim that Flock partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico to craft the bill and pass it.

...

Ultimately, reputable governments should not do business with disreputable companies. While governments should think long and hard about not using ALPRs, if local governments insist on doing so, at a bare minimum, they should adopt strong guardrails governing future ALPR use – including strictly limiting data retention, data sharing, and what crimes they can be used to enforce. And, of course, they should refuse to partner with any company that regularly misleads the public, elected officials, and even its own customers.