This is a verbatim quote from Flock’s latest blog post:
For decades, policing often relied heavily on eyewitness descriptions.
An officer might hear:
“We’re looking for a white Ford.”
“The suspect was driving a blue Jeep.”
What happened next?
Officers would stop every vehicle matching that general description in the area. That meant multiple drivers, often entirely innocent, were pulled over and had unwelcome interactions with law enforcement simply because their car looked similar. Those stops could lead to frustration, fear, and unnecessary escalation. And historically, those broad stop practices have disproportionately affected communities of color.
This is exactly the kind of dynamic that creates distrust.
Flock changes that.
Instead of stopping every white Ford or blue Jeep in a radius, officers receive alerts only when a specific license plate associated with a reported crime is detected. Not every vehicle of a certain color. Not every driver in a neighborhood. Just the one vehicle that matches the reported plate. That’s precision policing. It reduces unnecessary stops. It reduces guesswork. It reduces broad, discretionary sweeps. And that reduction in discretion helps reduce bias.
The passage directly echoes a comment made last week by Skylor Hearn on a privacy-focused livestream hosted by VPN company vp.net. Hearn appeared alongside Dan Haley, Flock’s Chief Legal Officer. Hearn told the audience:
In the old days… it was the citizen, one of you, reporting what you saw in a flash, in a horrific moment in your life, and you described generally a light-colored car. And so we’re stopping every light-colored car that’s going down the road in that area. And 99% of those people in those cars had nothing to do with that crime, but we’re pulling you over sometimes at gunpoint, taking you out… The technology gives us the ability to be more select and discretionary in those same kind of encounters. So we’re not indiscriminately just stopping everyone that resembled the citizen’s call. This gives us another tool to help us be more sniper than shotgun.
Same argument, same structure, same anecdote. Cops used to pull over every white car at gunpoint; now Flock saves them from themselves.
Hearn was introduced on the stream as “Chief Deputy, Chambers County Sheriff’s Office.” That’s true — he holds that title.
What the hosts neglected to mention is that Hearn is also the Executive Director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, a registered lobbyist for Clearview AI in 2020–2021, and a former government affairs adviser at K&L Gates, where Clearview AI was his client.
He joined Clearview in-house in 2022 as its Director of Government Affairs, spending his time testifying in state legislatures against banning or restricting police use of facial recognition technology.
When a viewer asked Hearn directly about his Clearview AI and K&L Gates history, he disclosed it — framing it all as “public policy work” and talking about “misconceptions about technology.” He did not use the word “lobbyist.”
So a man who is simultaneously a Flock subscriber and the Sheriffs’ Association’s legislative director sat down with Flock’s Chief Legal Officer on a livestream, and a week later their shared talking point appeared on Flock’s corporate blog.
The best argument this team could muster asks us to accept the premise they’re selling: that police officers are simply incapable of conducting constitutional traffic stops without an AI to chaperone them.
Their proposed solution to police violating one group’s rights? Let Flock violate everyone’s.
The Fourth Amendment does not have a carve-out for good intentions, and mass surveillance is not a civil rights program.