As the internet continues to transform into a collection of walled gardens and AI slop, I find myself more often on Reddit, which still seems to be mostly human-generated content. A few weeks back I was in the Fort Wayne subreddit, reading a post by a person who said their father had recently been busted coming back from Michigan on I-69, where he’d bought a quantity of marijuana. For some reason six ounces comes to mind.
The traffic stop was bullshit, one of those non-offensive offenses police deploy when they want you for something else. The post author said they know their father, and that he is a weed smoker, but not a dealer; the hefty amount was so he wouldn’t have to make so many trips from Indiana to Michigan. But in Indiana, where cannabis remains illegal, six ounces is felony weight, and so it sounds like dad is well and truly screwed.
How did they know he’d be holding? Another poster offered this observation: The freeway between Fort Wayne and the Michigan border has Flock cameras, the AI-enabled license-plate readers that have become popular with cops and municipalities hungry for traffic-violation money. Over time, it’s easy for the AI to speculate on who’s driving to Michigan purely to buy weed — frequent trips, short turnaround time, etc. It’s entirely possible the police were waiting for this moment, and seized it.
I thought of this when I read this WashPost story (gift link) about how the Flock camera network has become a so-called rogue cop’s best friend:
JEFFERSON, Ga. — Marci Bakely couldn’t understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was.
When she went to buy groceries or on a date or to the doctor, he’d text her about it, sometimes within minutes, despite working 15 miles from her home as a police chief in a small town in the Atlanta suburbs. One day in 2024, when he incorrectly suspected that she’d gone to see a man against his wishes, he messaged her, “I didn’t think you would slip up,” according to texts she shared with The Washington Post.
Bakely, 50, began to feel like she was constantly being watched. She says she installed three cameras around her home and on her patio, to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and nervously waved it down every wall. Three times, in desperation, she says she drove her Kia to a mechanic’s shop, asking them to scan for trackers on her car.
But it wasn’t a tracker on her car. It was Flock, and the database her cop ex could easily consult:
Like thousands of other law-enforcement agencies across the United States, his police force could follow cars spotted by Flock’s sprawling network of artificial-intelligence roadside cameras, which record passing license plates into a mappable database that officers can search while investigating crime.
Bakely’s ex was one of at least 50 LEOs to use the network for non-crime fighting reasons, about half of those to stalk or spy on women. When I mentioned this at lunch Sunday, one of the other people at the table said ICE is using similar technology to track brown people in Pontiac, north of Detroit. I really, really hate the surveillance state this country is becoming, especially when it’s so easy for bad actors in uniform to use it for nefarious ends.
Where I live, these cameras have been donated by a public-safety nonprofit, and their website is full of happy statistics about all the crime they’ve prevented, the lost children recovered, etc. It’s not hard to envision a future when police spend less and less time on actual patrols or developing intelligence, and more looking at screens and responding to alerts generated by AI analysis of who’s driving where.
And stalking exes, of course. Can’t forget that.
Folks, my week of hell is pretty much over, but Election Day awaits on Tuesday, so we’ll see how it goes. I figure by Wednesday I can finally truly relax. Of course, it didn’t help that I stayed out late Saturday night to see the Gories in Detroit, but it was a very fun show, and I’m entitled to enjoy my life in the go-go phase of my retirement. Slo-go is only a few short years away.