VOL. I · NO. 8567SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2026
The Daily Buffoon
FACT CHECK ✒ EDITORIAL ABSURDITY: 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡

How and why Texas deputy used 83K Flock cameras to track woman after abortion: What we know

Filed 1w ago · Via Snopes · The Buffoon Desk
THIS STORY IS SCORED
Scheming Weasel faster
Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Records confirm a Johnson County, Texas sheriff's deputy searched Flock Safety's license-plate camera network — 6,809 camera networks totaling 83,345 cameras — on May 9, 2025, to locate a woman after she reportedly self-administered an abortion. The search log listed the reason as "had an abortion, search for female," and the case was tied to an incident that began when a family member called seeking a welfare check after not hearing from her for weeks.

Deputies used a TransUnion locator tool to identify the woman's car and plate, then ran it through Flock, which showed she'd previously been in Dallas but yielded no recent hits. The sheriff told 404 Media the woman's family feared she might bleed to death and deputies were trying to get her to a hospital; a deputy's internal report, filed eight months later, said the search was meant to check on her and her children's safety.

At the scene, officers treated the home as a potential crime scene, photographed a container the woman's partner said held the fetus, and discussed possible charges before contacting the district attorney's office, which said Texas law did not permit charging the woman for the abortion or miscarriage. Deputies also discussed a possible civil suit against the pharmaceutical company that supplied the pill.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
A mass surveillance network built and sold as a tool against car thieves and kidnappers turns out to be exactly as flexible as privacy advocates warned, capable of retasking itself toward tracking a woman's reproductive choices with a few keystrokes and a vague justification. The welfare-check explanation may well be true, but it arrived eight months late and conveniently after the search became public, which is not how sincere concern for someone's safety usually gets documented. Texas law didn't let them charge her, so instead they got her license plate run through 83,000 cameras and her private medical crisis logged as a crime scene — a distinction without much comfort.
Source: Read the original at Snopes → Scored: Scheming Weasel faster · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0
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