Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search

Link for the curious

https://www.kxlf.com/news/america-in-crisis/aurora-police-de...

https://www.techspot.com/news/113320-one-california-town-fou...

and the saying OP is looking for is "You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride". A police saying since the early 70s.

I'll bite. I'm sure it has happened. But how often?

As long as they shout "police", they can knock down your front door, throw a flash-bang into your infant's crib and disable them for life, then go "whoops" when they realize they have the wrong address and you'll be on the hook for replacing the door they destroyed.

If LE "just" shoots at you (i.e. you're not actively firing or an immediate threat - and without commenting on the "should" of that) then... you might be "fine", once you're disabled.

If you're actively firing at LE, they're going to hit you with "overwhelming force" (ever seen a news story where there's 50+ bullet holes in a car, or a suspect shot 15 times, by police? That's "overwhelming force") and any survival on your part is going to be sheer dumb luck and "not very likely".

Then you get hella hard time because technically it's an evidence and arguing against evidence is always way harder, even if the argument is "if you squint and imagine that this guy wore a wig and painted his face, here's an expert opinion that height and figure difference could be an illusion from camera position". Court almost always defaults to evidence and experts.

Or it wasn't a burglary in your girlfriend house, but face/plate-matching algorithms screwed up.

It's hard to choose between "police give hard time to victim and victim relatives" and "police randomly decides who fit the bill and get this person sacked"

>you can't have more arrests without the means to do so.

Not exactly sure what you're trying to say... you can always have more arrests. Make more things crime. Pre-crime, thought crime, speech crime. When you run out of physical space you start stacking the prisoners 10 deep. When that runs out of space you start executing them and putting them in ovens.

Instead of arguing against actual regulatory policy, you are mind-reading malicious intent into hypothetical scenarios (and people) you just invented. Or real examples that you're broadstroking against a "they" which is somehow "HN."

I am not sure how you can justify trying to paint so broad a stroke across an entire community, or feel justified in creating a bucket of "useful idiots" into which you just throw whole classes of unnamed people without engaging with any particular argument.

I get you're angry, my man, but maybe you should question exactly who it is you're angry with.

Yes it very much is, there's plenty of evidence

Note that all the other charges against this person were dropped.

That's exactly what Flock is doing. It's just the latest variation on "power corrupts".

Oh I wonder what kind of terror he's talking about

> Illegal blocking of sidewalk selling fake handbags

Jesus Christ. If this is what brings you to a surveillance state with open arms maybe you should talk to people outside of your bubble.

If you consider that terrorizing, you need help.

I guarantee there is _some_ group that finds some aspect of you, your life, or that of some of your loved ones at least as annoying as you find those things.

Locally there was a recent pushback on them and the sheriff basically said "They've been there forever" and "Don't worry...it's just us with the footage"

I'm afraid that the way things currently stand, vast majority of people are only gonna see the cases where "it made sense to have that" for years and years, until they feel it one day on their own skin - and then their own story is not going to be heard, just like everyone else's before them. Frog boiling sometimes intentionally takes a lot of time

The officer continued yelling at him to comply, all the while the man was ablaze, shocked, and bruised.

Cops should have tasers taken away. They believe they are "make people do what I say" devices rather than the rare "make this extremely violent person who is an imminent threat to life and person stop being violent temporarily so other officers can continue to use non-lethal force to de-escalate the situation".

> Unless they have direct evidence [...] it's a pre-crime judgment.

But how does it being pre-crime judgment etc. imply it is a pretext too?

Just look up the definition:

- A pretext is "a false reason given to hide the real motivation behind an action." [1]

- A pretextual stop is "pull(ing) people over for minor rule violations [...] as an excuse to conduct a search and go fishing for other crimes." [2]

Notice it says "false", "hide", and "other crime"? And not merely "bad reason" to "serve as an excuse" to "search for any crime"?

Here, they appear to have done exactly what they claimed they their intentions were, and as a result discovered exactly what they suspected. Is anyone disputing this? If this was a "pretext", then what the heck are we alleging were their "real" motivations and "other" crimes? How could they have possibly been more honest in their intentions?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretext

[2] https://www.policingproject.org/pretextual-traffic

It seems that the police was investigating the suspect for a separate crime "bail jumping".

There was a warrant, and the suspect was detained and searched with the powers granted by a judge via a warrant.

Again I ask, what's the 4th amendment violation here? That a cop assumed something? A cop is free to assume whatever they want, as long as that's not what they rely on to make a detention or search.

>relying on an existing warrant and criminal record to justify [locating someone], and manufacture probable cause.

A judge issued for the detention of an individual, the police did so. Did the cops rely on the warrant to manufacture a probable cause? What are you arguing here, that the detention was legitimate, but the search was not and the evidence of the crime should be ignored via poisonous fruit? The detention was legitimate, when someone is detained, they are searched, that seems legitimate to me.

I think the confusion arises from a lack of distinguishing between probatory and investigative evidence. A conviction requires hard probatory evidence ( beyond a reasonable doubt or preponderance depending on the charges), a search requires 'probable cause' (pre-search readily apparent, time sensitive, suspicion of a crime).

The purpose of a warrant is to bridge the gap between investigative and probatory evidence. Cops and detectives can obtain investigative evidence (that guides the investigation but is not sufficient to obtain a conviction) by their own means with standard limitations, certain actions like searches are protected by requiring approval from a judge, that approval is called a search warrant. The justification for requesting a warrant can be entirely investigative, it does not require probatory evidence as that would be against the very nature of the system being described, the purpose is to obtain probatory evidence without vulnerating individual privacy rights by adding a check and balance from a different power.

So it wouldn't make sense to argue that the hypothesis was weak, or that flock cameras were used, whatever investigative evidence or hypothesis they had is irrelevant, what matters is only that they had a warrant, whether they got it by submitting the inter-state drug crossing as evidence, or submitting something else as evidence,

Here's where I had to google some nuances. In the case there already existed an arrest warrant, a search of the person would be legitimate, but not a search of the car. So if there's a probable cuase being mentioned, it relates only to the searching of the car, not to stopping the car (as that would have been covered by the arrest warrant).

The probable cause mentioned in filing seems to be based on odour, whether that's enough, I don't know, it appears that it is.

I can see though how this might be nuanced, and how an attorney might argue that odour of an individual officer is insufficient. Maybe some defenders can get him out of the case, but does that mean that the system is working incorrectly? Where? What are we arguing that an officer committed an unlawful search of the car after a lawful arrest? Certainly a routine incident (unless grossly unlawful), wouldn't even merit disciplinary action. And to my understanding completely unrelated to

The complaint even mentions that the officer found a weed grinder in the top of the car, which could have easily been used as probable cause, as it was readily apparent, but it was only found during the search.

So yeah it doesn't look like there was a 4th amendment violation, and even less that it would be related to the flock cameras, there was an arrest warrant, and as far as the search it was not related to.

I'd like to add that every time one of these cases against Flock comes up, it never amounts to anything, I get the argument that this can "start with unsympathetic cases", but I take it there's no cases of dumb teenagers without priors? Like this is the worst abuse that can be found relating to flock cameras? Flock is 'advertising' with cases of lost children being recovered, those have to be weighted, at least I will. I won't analyze every case of a criminal being subjected to a potentially unlawful search, that was actually 100% on point and actually found the evidence.

In the end, the pre-crime is actually done against flock in the (left) public opinion, it's being judged based on slippery slope arguments on potential dystopian futures, instead of what is actually happening.

Bringing up cases like this that aren't even borderline is probably doing more damage if anything, there were cases of officers stalking their ex-gf with the cameras, and it seems that the audit trail doesn't track specific warrants, it just asks for a general string that's usually filled with 'warrant', those are true weak points, this is just engagement bait to get blue dress/white dress debates where the left defends the rights of criminals and false positives(which might be legitimate), while the right sees criminals being prosecuted for their crimes. If that's what it comes down to, I don't see the dress blue, what can I tell ya.

Edit: i don't get why the bail jumping charge was dropped though, like how can you lack evidence for that? If the conviction was never fact based but law based, then that may be grounds for arguing the arrest warrant was illegitimate and thus argue poisonous tree?

"She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...

it gets worse federally.

"Blanche assures anti-abortion supporters that Dobbs will be ‘permanent in every single state’"

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/03/blanche-pledged-abo...

So what happens when they use cameras outside of usps to crate pretext so a crazy alt right state judge issues a warrant under the assumption that you picked up pills in the mail?

"AG nominee tells faith leaders he will take action to restrict abortion drug access"

https://stateline.org/2026/08/04/ag-nominee-tells-faith-lead...

And relevant to interstate weed, what about kava, peptides, 7oh? they literally have million+ plus stakes in pushing drugs. Even when it means blocking worse drugs (7oh) so they can push slightly less addictive but still harmful garbage.

"Senate inquiry suggests Trump administration softened kratom and tobacco policies in quid pro quo"

https://www.statnews.com/2026/08/05/senator-ron-wyden-invest...

"Trump Administration’s Fake Crackdown Leaves Most ‘Gas Station Heroin’ on the Shelves. According to March 2026 financial disclosures, Mullin invested between $500,001 and $1 million in Botanic Tonics, LLC, of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the company that makes Feel Free Classic – the tonic found in the victim’s bedroom. Mullin reportedly urged officials to remove language from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website warning of kratom’s harms."

https://www.citizen.org/news/trump-administrations-fake-crac...

It's all disgusting. Their voters deserve these consequences.

But they're forcing the rest of us to suffer.