Cops Searched 19,000 Cameras With a Reason Box That Said asdfg
Audit logs show officers searching a 19,000-camera Flock network with reason-box entries like LMAO, idk and asdfg, and most departments did nothing about it.
Last summer a sheriff’s deputy in Lake County, Indiana ran a license plate search across more than 19,000 Flock cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The reason he logged in the system was LMAO.
One laugh is not the story. The Electronic Frontier Foundation pulled the audit logs and found dozens of officers typing LOL, hehe, haha, idk, blah and TBD into the reason box, along with button mashing like asdfg and nmbvcbnm. Others wrote idiot, weird kid, or something ruder about the new search engine. Thousands more wrote investigation, test, or left the box blank. The searches run from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock swapped the free-text field for a drop-down list, which the EFF called a loss for transparency. Most departments did nothing. Two officers who typed hehe and idk were counseled. A cop who wrote idiot got away with it because his union contract’s 90-day window for internal investigations had already closed.
Skip it if you already assume that a reason field is decoration.
The logs show something narrower and worse than a joke. A search that covered 19,000 cameras across 1,558 towns left a record that sat unread until a nonprofit filed for it, and the only thing between an officer and that location data was a text box he could fill with asdfg. Ask your city council for the audit logs behind its Flock contract before the next renewal.