There’s a dropdown menu inside the New Bedford Police Department’s Flock cameras terminal that asks why an officer is running a license plate. “Traffic infraction” is one of the options. Nothing downstream checks whether that’s true. That gap, not the officer now accused of exploiting it, is the real story out of Massachusetts this month.
New Bedford officer Emily Pacheco is under internal affairs investigation after her ex-girlfriend alleged, in a sworn affidavit, that Pacheco used the department’s network of Flock cameras to track her after their relationship ended in April. A district court judge found the threat credible enough to order Pacheco to surrender her firearms and suspend her license to carry, then extended that order for another six months in August. Those are serious findings about one person. What should worry every driver in New Bedford is how long it apparently took anyone to notice.
Pacheco ran 18 Flock searches in April, the month her ex says she ended things. In May, that number jumped to 259. In June it was 220, according to data obtained by the New Bedford Light. Some searches pulled a span of a day to over a week of a vehicle’s movement at once, and Pacheco reportedly queried camera networks well outside New Bedford’s own 20 units, reaching into neighboring towns and states. The reason logged most often: traffic infraction.
At an August hearing to extend the abuse prevention order, Pacheco testified the searches were professional, not personal. Her attorney said a confidential informant had tied the ex-girlfriend’s car to a separate narcotics investigation, and Pacheco, working as a detective at the time, was simply doing her job. She said she couldn’t recall how many times she’d run the plate. A colleague who testified at the hearing said officers receive no formal training on Flock cameras at all.
Here’s the part that should alarm car owners who’ve never met either woman: none of this required a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Flock’s architecture lets any credentialed officer search any plate for any stated reason, and the reason is whatever that officer types into a text field. Police Chief Jason Thody told the Light there’s no way to catch misuse “up front” and that investigators can only spot it after a complaint arrives. New Bedford had already lived through a preview of that blind spot: an officer entered “immigration” as his search reason back in January, a category the department’s own policy forbids sharing, and nobody caught it for six months until a reporter asked.
Nobody in Pacheco’s chain of command appears to have flagged the more obvious problem, either: a detective was allowed to keep working an investigation that ran directly through her own ex-girlfriend’s car, months after that same ex says Pacheco showed up at her house uninvited and refused to leave. The department won’t say whether the confidential informant was even registered. The police union’s public response amounted to a request for patience while the process plays out.
New Bedford isn’t an isolated glitch. It’s the latest entry in a pattern this outlet has been tracking for weeks. Savannah, Georgia benched six employees over similar misuse. A California court just blessed a separate license-plate scanning company’s tow-truck network, which has already logged nine billion reads nationwide. And a Jaguar Land Rover press loaner got flagged as stolen nationwide because of a single mistyped digit on a manufacturer plate. Three different failures, one shared root cause: a system built to move fast on identification and slowly, if at all, on verification.
The nonprofit Institute for Justice added New Bedford’s case to a database it published this month tallying more than 140 documented instances of police misusing license plate readers nationwide, including at least 39 alleged stalking cases spanning more than a dozen states. Massachusetts, notably, has no state law governing how departments use the technology at all, unlike some of its New England neighbors.
Flock, for its part, announced sweeping changes the same week Pacheco’s hearing made headlines: mandatory case numbers on every law enforcement search by the end of the year, mandatory adoption of its abnormal-activity auditing tool, an automatic lockout feature for flagged accounts, and a cut to default data retention from 30 days to seven. CEO Garrett Langley used the moment to ask state legislatures to do what his own company had, until now, left optional: “Mandate real auditing on every law enforcement data system,” he wrote, offering to help states draft the legislation at no cost.
That’s a remarkable request from a company that has spent nine years selling itself on speed and reach, not restraint. It’s also the tell. When the vendor is publicly asking lawmakers to force its own customers into guardrails, the guardrails clearly weren’t load-bearing to begin with.
Nothing about the Flock cameras in New Bedford malfunctioned. It logged a plate, recorded a reason, and trusted that the person typing it was telling the truth. Two hundred and fifty-nine times in a single month, apparently, nobody checked.