Suney Munintrangkul/Getty Images Add Jalopnik on Google: Google Discover On top of normalizing widespread public surveillance, the proliferation of Flock cameras has proven problematic due to the way police have abused the images and information they provide. Officers have been caught using the technology to stalk ex-wives, stalk ex-girlfriends to the point where she felt the need to change her identity, and spy on innocent civilians to the point of racking up 100 felony charges for misuse of official information. What you may not know is that every time an officer looks something up on Flock's database, they have to put in a reason for the search. And, you know what? I'm not even going to feign surprise at anything revealed in this story, because given what we already know about how irresponsibly police in this country have treated the erosion of our collective privacy, some of the "reasons" officers have given for searches are exactly as stupid and disrespectful as you'd expect. 'Hehe' Josie Elias/Shutterstock According to an analysis of Flock search logs done by the non-profit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, some reasons given include "LOL," "LMAO" (that's for when the suspected crime is funnier than "LOL" can convey), "sexy" (seriously creepy), and the refreshingly honest "idk lol." Some other examples include "Hehe," "robbery i don't remember the case number leave me alone," "d*ckhead" but it's an i instead of an asterisk, "sh*thead" in the same spirit, "idiot," "driving around being weird," and "WEIRD KID." These aren't isolated incidents, either. The searches for terms like "LOL" span multiple days and months, scanning thousands of devices across ALPR networks. EFF also found a whole bunch of searches where the reason given was literal keyboard gibberish. Think something that looks like "ggyjgyujdsrdghdfhjkghjghk" — basically what you'd get if a cat walked all over your laptop, or what you'd type as a response to some yogurt lid survey you're only doing so you can enter a contest. The joke here, of course, is that this isn't a ploy to get free yogurt, but rather how officers of the law are treating access to surveillance footage of us all. It's a dropdown menu now Halbergman/Getty Images To their mild credit, a bunch of the police departments involved have addressed these garbage search reasons to EFF and said that they've launched internal investigations. For example, the Richmond PD officers who did "Hehe" and "idk" were said to be "counseled," and the former Corona PD officer who put in "WEIRD KID" is no longer employed for unrelated reasons. Although the badge-carrying Rhodes Scholar (LMAO, jk!) who threw in "idiot" as a reason to do a Flock search in 2023 is getting a pass since the statute of limitations for this sort of thing in Columbus, Ohio, is apparently 90 days. Most of these searches happened before early 2026, and it's probably because in late 2025, Flock started replacing the "reasons" text box that officers can type anything into with a dropdown menu of preset offense categories such as "Traffic infraction." Whether or not "No crime happening, just bored and stalking lol" is also a dropdown entry is unclear.