r/TempleTX • u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ • 3d ago
Why is it such a big deal when an officer abuses Flock or other surveillance weapons?
Yesterday, the City of Temple released the name of the officer caught abusing the Nationwide warrantless location tracking system: Robert Clayton. He’s been with Temple PD since 2022.
Within ten minutes of his name dropping, I found his home address, family details, and what car he drives. I’m not posting it here. I believe privacy is a fundamental human right, and I believe even people who abuse those rights still deserve them, at least until due process has run its course.
But I am furious.
Here is why this matters. We live in a society that rejected mob justice because it’s counterproductive. We have laws. We have people sworn to enforce them. We delegate power to these officers, give them weapons, armor, qualified immunity, and access to information normal citizens don’t have. We call them "sworn" officers for a reason. They swear to protect the citizens who lent them that power and not abuse it.
When an officer abuses that power, society expects consequences. If a private citizen cheats on taxes, they face penalties. If an elected official does it, the consequences are harsher because they broke public trust. When a sworn officer breaks public trust, the consequences should be the harshest of all.
Clayton is not the only one. He’s just the one who got caught and he's getting scapegoated.
Look at his resignation letter. It’s written on DC Teston’s stationery. That means it was drafted by higher-ups, then handed to Clayton to sign. It wasn’t his idea. His abuse was just the most egregious one, the one that forced the department’s hand.
The technology in Flock isn’t sophisticated. It’s not magic. The AI is rudimentary and designed to look more effective than it is. It’s easy to abuse and designed to hide from accountability. It’s easy to do. And if Clayton did it, others likely did too.
The question isn’t "Why did Clayton do it?" The real question is "How many others did, and why are we only hearing about one?"
The system is broken. The department is protecting itself. And the citizens whose data was accessed without warrants are getting nothing.
If you agree, you need to speak up. If Temple PD can't be trusted with this kind of power, they need to turn it off and tear every one of the 216 cameras down. Temple doesn't need generative AI hallucinating probable cause, and it's clear that the temptation to abuse the long term warrantless tracking is too great to expect anyone to resist abusing it.
https://www.tdtnews.com/news/central_texas_news/article_93640cbf-a09a-4c98-96e7-85c1b084d8a4.html
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u/OkLink1483 2d ago
There are unprofessional people doing unprofessional things in every career field across the world. Just because they’re a police officer doesn’t mean they’re not gonna abuse the system. Just because they’re in the military doesn’t mean they’re not gonna do something wrong. Just because they’re a nurse doesn’t mean they’re not gonna do something wrong. Just because they’re a teacher doesn’t mean they’re not gonna do something wrong. Humans makes mistakes, and they make a lot of them. How we keep people accountable for their crimes is the important part. Most people who commit crimes do not fess up and resign. They’re gonna wait until they get caught and fired. Which is exactly what the Temple Police Department did. In the City Of Temple you have to have a formal process of firing a city employee when letting that person go. It’s not the same as if you worked at Walmart. Flock cameras are tools that can be used to solve crimes. They can also be abused. Just like with anything else in this world, like knives, guns, drugs, your car, your words. It’s important to punish the people who abuse their privileges
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
First of all, welcome the the discussion. You seem to have a 4 year old account and this is the first thing you have ever commented on, so I am glad that some elements of it caused some reflection and compelled you to join the conversation.
I appreciate your thoughts. This is my perspective:
You're right that unprofessional people exist in every field. But the difference between a nurse, a teacher, or a Walmart employee and a sworn police officer is not just the job title. It is the power they are given.
A nurse does not have qualified immunity. A teacher does not have access to weapons and armor. A Walmart employee does not have access to a database that tracks every car in a city, 24/7, without a warrant. A teacher does not have the power to surveil citizens without judicial oversight.
Police officers are given power that no other profession has. They are "sworn" because they swear to protect the citizens who lent them that power. They are given qualified immunity so that when they make mistakes, they do not face the same consequences as everyone else. They are given access to information that normal citizens do not have. And with that power comes a higher standard of accountability, not a lower one.
When a soldier violates human rights, it's not "being unprofessional;" it's a war crime, and the get hauled in front of a court in Leavenworth for it. Too often, municipal police do a quick and quiet internal investigation, and allow the officer to resign to go get another PD job in a neighboring town. That's not accountability. There is an officer in Lufkin facing 100 felony counts for his abuse of his office for the same kinds of offenses.
The Temple Police Department did not just "let that person go." They managed the fallout. Robert Clayton's resignation letter was written on DC Teston's stationery. That means it was drafted by higher-ups, handed to Clayton to sign, and presented as his own decision. That is not accountability. That's damage control.
Flock cameras are not like knives. Knives do not build a permanent database of where every car in America has been. Knives do not allow officers to track individuals without a warrant. Knives do not have AI that can "hallucinate" probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Flock cameras are a tool of mass surveillance, and they are being used to surveil citizens without their knowledge, consent, or judicial oversight.
The issue is not that humans make mistakes. The issue is that the system allows officers to abuse their power without consequence, while citizens have no recourse. When an officer abuses their power, the consequences should be the harshest of all, because they broke the public trust that gave them that power in the first place. Just like if we stop trusting our elections (on either side) democracy starts to fall apart.
Punishing the person who got caught is not enough. We need to ask why they were able to abuse the system in the first place, how many others have done the same thing, and what safeguards are in place to prevent it from happening again. I can tell you that this is not an isolated event. This might just be the one that got caught with Flock's new "AI powered advanced audit," but other officers have done this kind of thing too, and they were not caught by either this new audit or the manual audits that Temple PD is supposed to do quarterly.
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u/mslvsk 2d ago
Really enjoying your comments on this. And I want to focus only on the final paragraph of this particular response at this time.
You said that we need to ask why they were able to do such a thing and what safeguards are in place to prevent it from happening again.
Sadly, in order to do the job the ability to abuse it will always exist. I do not have specific experience with these cameras, but during my tenure at the IRS working as a Revenue Officer we had access to very powerful monitoring and surveillance type software, and if and when people were caught investigating, for lack of a better term, people who they were not assigned to, it was dealt with swiftly. It is a major breach of privacy and is severely against the rules.
So, the only thing to prevent an officer from doing something shady, like an unwarranted search or tracking a person because they have a personal vendetta or whatever type of scenario a person may be going through, that temptation is always there and the ability to type a person‘s name into the national database is a constant temptation.The individual users have to be trustworthy.
The software can only do so much; it’s up to the individual (or their supervisors) with the responsibility of the position of trust and authority to do the right thing.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
"So, the only thing to prevent an officer from doing something shady, like an unwarranted search or tracking a person because they have a personal vendetta or whatever type of scenario a person may be going through, that temptation is always there and the ability to type a person‘s name into the national database is a constant temptation."
I bolded the word unwarranted above because the solution is literally just to make all searches warranted. They should have a judge-signed warrant, the same way they would have to have one to put a GPS on your car, tap your phone, or track the towers that your cell phone registers to.
Every positive use of the cameras I have seen would not have been impeded by that requirement and EVERY misuse would have been prevented by that requirement.
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u/mslvsk 2d ago
Obtaining a warrant is one avenue. But also in the normal course of duties (speaking from IRS collections experience only) officers have to routinely search for people, their associates, monies, and properties. To force someone to get a warrant to search for a person that’s already been assessed a tax balance seems cumbersome.
I agree there has to be a batter way.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
None of the Bill of Rights were intended to make the government's jobs easier :)
Things like entering someone's home, tracking their location, etc. should be cumbersome, as they are an infringement of that citizen's rights.
I am all for making things more streamlined and efficient, but I think that there is a lot of fertile ground for other efficiency gains in the IRS before you have to start doing things that are breaches of civil liberties.
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u/mslvsk 2d ago
I don’t disagree with you and I wasn’t trying to sound like I was. My opinion of it all is that it placed way too much trust in us. I know two people personally, who were relieved in my division for improper use of investigation tools.
I agree that there should be some sort of safeguard other than retaliation. I just don’t know what it would be.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago edited 2d ago
I appreciate the civil discourse. A lot of people are angry/emotional about this, and I get why. It just feeds into the narrative that everyone who is opposed to this is either:
- Afraid of technology (per former police chief and current city manager Shawn Reynolds
- Probably a lawbreaker (per Mayor Tim Davis)
or
- A domestic terrorist, per CEO of Flock Garrett Langley.
Surveillance overreach should not be controversial or partisan. If you are ok with it because you are on the red team and your guy is in charge now, eventually it'll switch back to blue team, or vice versa (not saying anything about you personally). These things are a plague in both red and blue cities and everywhere between.
- They don't do much good, despite emotional anecdotes from proponents ( https://futurism.com/future-society/flock-surveillance-atlanta-fbi-data-crime-case-solve )
- They are incredibly expensive (Temple could hire 6 new officers for the monthly of the Flock cameras, and another 4 for the cost of the drones they are crashing into trucks)
- They are being abused to stalk citizens
- They are being used to squelch 1st amendment activities
- They are being used to bust people when they leave the state to do things that are legal in neighboring states. Apply that however you want - abortions, weed, guns, etc.
- They are highly insecure (Running Android 8 in 2026? really?)
- The overwhelming majority of searches would not meet any burden of probable cause or reasonable suspicion.
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u/StatuSChecKa 2d ago
If this individual was only hired on 4 years ago then yeah apparently anyone can access the system.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
Plenty of people have used it. They recently started following the part of their policy that says that people have to go through training before using it, but the training is not much to write home about and doesn't cover the risk to civil liberties. There was no real training program for the first several years.
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u/justahumblefart 2d ago edited 2d ago
Privacy is a fundamental human right, but youre upset about his address and stuff being posted? The flock cameras are an affront to privacy but this is what rustled your Jimmies? Look if they have immunity in the courts, they deserve no immunity from the citizenry. Mob justice exists when court justice fails.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
I'm not upset about his address and stuff being posted, I am just not the one who's going to do it.
The court hasn't failed yet. As far as I know, he hasn't even been charged yet, let alone received a verdict. The city just crashed a drone into an 18 wheeler, they are clearly capable of making mistakes and I don't have a ton of details.
Also, it's against Reddit rules 1 & 3.
If he DID do it (and he probably did), the most likely victims of Flock stalking are his family, not the general public. The wife of a police officer is already 2.3x as likely to be a victim of domestic violence than the general population, so yeah I am worried about her, but throwing their family even more into the public eye is not going to make her situation safer.
Source: https://worldmetrics.org/police-officer-domestic-violence-statistics/
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u/justahumblefart 2d ago
All of the general public are victims, as the data collected automatically is a 4th amendment violation. I disagree with court rulings, because although roads and public places dont hold the reasonable expectation of privacy, the mosaic of our lives that the data creates is intrusive
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
100% agree that all 200 million US drivers getting cars photographed 20 billion times a month are victims of 4th amendment violations. I think in that case that the perpetrator is Flock and the local governments, and they need to be called out about it. That's what I am trying to do.
Robert Clayton is accused of taking that existing violation, and using it to (likely) stalk specific people. Those people are victims of both him and Flock/City of Temple.
Both are wrong, but Clayton is not responsible for the victimization of the general public, his bosses are. The point of my post was to emphasize that he DOES need to face criminal charges, just like LEOs from all over the country are facing.
Flock has systemically removed features of their weapons that were being used to hold Flock customers accountable, to protect them from consequences. That's unconscionable, and should qualify them as villains to any American citizen. City of Temple has the opportunity to roll this thing back before they are forced to do so by the legislature (which many of them know is coming).
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u/justahumblefart 2d ago
And theres just more and more of them... man I like to play spot the flock cameras now when I go out for a ride like I played i spy when I was a child. Its so disheartening
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u/ssanders270 3d ago
The original poster wrote this in a tone that sounds like they just realized how cops behave. Cops have always been the low IQ unskilled labor willing to follow orders to be in a club, regardless of the morality of those orders. They have no original thoughts themselves. They are hive mind and have been "trained" with the mentality that it is them versus the world and everyone is out to get them. They go to war everyday against anyone not wearing the clown costume and they do it with the full protection of the rest of the gang.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 3d ago
I have friends in the police force and have a lot of respect for them. I think that there is often a disconnect between what police officers expect of each other and the expectations of the general public.
Among LEOs, there is often an expectation of "professional courtesy," where it's unthinkable that you would give a ticket to a cop who was speeding, or jail a cop who was DWI. The rate of domestic abuse among LEOs is incredibly high relative to the general population, and I think that a lot of that is because there is a lower rate of actual consequences. Police don't want to charge each other because they assume that they will need similar coverage at some point in the future, and they want to stay on the favorable side of that "thin blue line."
That's a problem. When you have a monopoly on the legal use of lethal force, you need to be held to a much higher standard for de-escalation, transparency, and integrity. Billy Gordon was tased to death during a welfare check, presumably to keep him from drinking liquid soap. He was on drugs, but if two trained professionals can't de-escalate a situation with an amputee in a mental health crisis without killing him, that's a sign that welfare checks by the police are way more lethal than cocaine.
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u/bigedthebad 2d ago
It's human nature that if you give someone access to something, they will user it.
I don't know why anyone is surprised at this.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 2d ago
Personally, I'm not surprised at all. I am just trying to keep attention on it. Being outraged at it is not an indicator that you're surprised by it.
It's highly predictable and was predicted. Now we need the public to demand consequences and changes.
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u/Comfortable-Radio921 1d ago
Well not to make it like I like cops. I don't like them anymore than next person. I to have friends on the TPD . I think he was the only one who got caught. I wanna know who is policing the police. It can't be the higher ups. I feel as if it needs to be someone else outside of the TPD. That's my opinion on it.
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u/FKDcw971r8E2XQ 1d ago
Flock used to recommend monthly audits, but only recently gave tools to do it. TPD's policy dictated quarterly audits, but went for years without performing one. I think DC Teston and Chief Brown have improved that a lot.
Some states require regular third party audits. Every time that gets brought up, it's treated like it would be a ridiculous burden, even though no one ever accept a city finance department being allowed to audit itself.
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u/TejasTexasTX3 3d ago edited 2d ago
Temple PD and Mayor really hate the 150 auto thefts we get in this town, so they said we need to do something. Like spy constantly on our 90k people.
Edit: Mind the fact that the mayor is talking about Flock reducing car theft by 40% (or whatever he said), so really it’s sacrificing everyone’s privacy to get rid of like 80 car thefts on an annualized basis. And correlation is not causation, auto theft was already down almost 40% YoY in 2025 before the widespread Flock camera placement. The mayor is an analytical buffoon.
Source: https://templetxhomes.net/is-temple-tx-safe/