McGeehan is a former police officer, now the lawyer for a woman jailed for thirteen days after an automated license plate camera misidentified her. Asked whether the technology should exist at all, he said it can be and has been used properly, but wants a warrant requirement around it. He then listed officers recently fired in Georgia and Florida for running the system on ex-girlfriends and wives.
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Patrick, you said that, you know, you are a former police officer. You've sort of been around working cases that I'm sure involve surveillance and that sort of thing, you know, all the time. I'm curious how you think this technique. Technology should be used if it should be used, sort of like what the guardrail should be, that sort of thing, so that maybe there is space for it in some way, shape, or form. But like, should there be some sort of restrictions so that cases like this don't happen?
Yeah, I think there should. I mean, I'm not for the surveillance state. I don't think we need to be like London where there are cameras on every corner doing facial recognition and tracking people in their daily movements. I don't think we need to be tracking innocent, you know, everyday citizens. There needs to be something, whether it's a warrant requirement or some procedure that's employed, putting guardrails on this system. It is used properly in some cases. I've had cases where it was properly used. But the cases you're seeing now and that are coming to the attention of the abuses of this system where officers are being fired. You know, I think they had six Georgia officers fired last week for improper use. We've had some in Florida where they're stalking former girlfriends and wives and tracking people and providing information to unauthorized persons. I mean, that needs to stop. You know, it's the same thing with the technology they have in law enforcement databases where they can run tags. And, you know, we have had cases where clients' tags have been run for non-law enforcement purposes where officers are running girlfriends tags and boyfriends tags and stuff like that. You need to have those similar safeguards. You need to have that logging and tracking, and you need to have that requirement of law enforcement use only and proper law enforcement use only, not the willy-nilly stuff that they are doing now.
I'm curious, like, as you've been through this process of this specific case, are you hearing from other people around the country? Like, this is, I believe, maybe the most egregious one that I've heard of a mistaken identity and where there's been such a horrible consequence of you being arrested and spending time in prison. Patrick, have you heard from other people, other attorneys, other clients, other victims where similar things have happened since this has become public?
Yeah, when Lindsay's case went public and it started gathering news attention, I've been overrun with everything from civil rights issues dealing with the police to the flock issues, but the flock issues are significant. I've probably had hundreds of people reach out to me over flock issues and send me links to everything in our Florida area. These things are exploding in Florida. We're finding them everywhere. We're finding them in wildlife management areas. We're finding them at public gun ranges, at FWC ranges, places you wouldn't expect to find this technology, they're finding it at. And it's just all over. And there's a lot of attention in the central Florida area, particularly about the Flock camera usage. And there's been, I think in the last month, there's been five of them that have been cut down. You know, people are going out, cutting them down, which is never a good thing to do because that's absolutely a felony. But the flock cameras and numbers are just exploding everywhere. We had one, you know, those portable signs the police put up to slow you down. They flash the lights, speed limits, 35, you're going 40, and they'll flash a different color. Somebody found one of those and posted a video online that had a flock camera in it. So as the car passes by, it picks up the speed. And as the car passes by, the flock camera gets attacked. I mean, these things are popping up everywhere.
Yeah, I mean, the company has really exploded in popularity. You know, I've been writing about them for years at this point. And, you know, four or five years ago, it's like they were in a few dozen cities and towns across the U.S. And I think really over the last couple of years, it feels like almost the entire country is blanketed in these things at this point. And one thing that we found is that as their network gets larger and larger, the kind of like potential for abuse or something going wrong, it's not like a linear thing because you can end up tracking someone like across an entire state, across state lines, things like this, because they all kind of network together. And the potential for someone in like one town over to like have a mistake where they input the wrong license plate into a hot list or something like that, it just becomes like there's so many more people using the system. And so we're hearing more and more of these sorts of cases. We've also seen a lot of cities decide to end their contracts with Flock because of some of these cases. I'm curious if you've been following that at all.