UPTOWN — CMPD Police Chief Estella Patterson admitted she was “completely blindsided” to discover that a high-tech mass surveillance system capable of tracking every vehicle in the city without a warrant had been used by an officer to track a citizen without a warrant.
“We are deeply shaken by this betrayal of trust,” Patterson said of the Flock Safety camera network, which automatically logs the physical appearance, license plates, and exact daily routines of millions of innocent drivers into a private database. “When we entered into a partnership to access a privatized, AI-powered corporate panopticon, we did so under the impression it would only be used for good, wholesome law enforcement activities, and not for creepy, unauthorized spying.”
According to reports, the department’s illusion of a polite, harmless surveillance state was shattered after the State Bureau of Investigation revealed a 25-year-old officer had used the unrestricted database as a personal search engine.
“We want to assure the community that the Flock grid was explicitly designed to monitor the movements of the public for their own safety,” Patterson added, visibly struggling to comprehend how a system built entirely on the concept of tracking people’s private lives could be misused to track someone’s private life.
“Moving forward, we will be implementing strict new guidelines to ensure that our total surveillance apparatus remains strictly bureaucratic, entirely sterile, and absolutely not dystopian.”
At press time, CMPD officials announced they hope to prevent future incidents by simply asking the SBI to call ahead before conducting any investigations into them.
