Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' (www.404media.co)

Police in Johnson County, Texas used Flock Safety’s nationwide, AI-enabled license-plate and vehicle-surveillance network to search for a woman who self-administered an abortion. Officials publicly described the query as a welfare check — a missing-person search meant to ensure she wasn’t bleeding to death — and Flock said she “was never under criminal investigation” by the county. However, newly disclosed court records contradict that account: law enforcement treated the case as a “death investigation” and explicitly discussed the possibility of charging the woman, revealing a different investigatory posture than what was shared with the public. For the AI/ML community this episode highlights how automated license-plate recognition (ALPR) and camera networks can be repurposed beyond their stated safety uses. Technical features—real-time nationwide plate-matching, cross-jurisdictional data sharing, retention policies and AI-driven matching—make these systems powerful tools for surveillance but also create acute reproductive-privacy and due-process risks when combined with law enforcement discretion. The case underscores the need for stronger transparency, access controls, audit logs, and policy guardrails around ML-enabled surveillance systems so that model capabilities, data flows, and retention are auditable and constrained by law and civil-rights protections.