NORMAN, Okla. — A man tried to lure a third-grader into his car at Memorial Elementary’s SPARK Park in Houston on Sunday, then drove off. Four days later, police still don’t know who he is, and they may never find out, because the three license plate cameras that could have identified his car had already been cut down.
Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz told a community meeting downtown Thursday night that the cameras near the park were sliced off their poles before the attempted abduction, disabled by someone opposed to license plate reader technology in general. “Unfortunately, some person that’s not really cool with the license plate reader technology chose to cut the three down,” Diaz said. “We’re kind of hindered by that, but we’re still working on it.” Officers canvassed the neighborhood and contacted Houston ISD, but neighbors with their own home security footage refused to hand it over, too. Police are left looking for a red sedan, no plate number, no leads.
That’s the actual cost of Houston’s anti-Flock crusade. Not an abstract privacy win. A predator with a head start.
The city has been living this fight since the Fourth of July, when two Flock cameras were found cut in half and spray-painted on Washington Avenue, one with an American flag jammed into it.
More turned up dismantled near Memorial Park days later, and four more were sawed through overnight in Old Braeswood, the steel cut about 18 inches above the ground. John Wilkerson, legislative liaison for the Texas Municipal Police Association, called the pattern “the ignorance of the individuals that are rising to the level of violence for their political statement.” He’s not wrong.
Reporting has tracked social media videos with millions of views walking people through exactly how to disable or destroy these cameras. A Virginia man openly admitted disabling 13 cameras with a pair of vice grips, citing the Fourth Amendment, then started a legal defense fund.
None of that changed anything for whoever was holding the saw near Memorial Elementary. Houston police credit the Flock network with recovering more than $7.4 million in stolen vehicles since 2021, and Flock says the system helped trace two abducted children to a Houston-area apartment complex where both were found safe. None of that mattered when the cameras came down. Vandalism doesn’t ask what case needs the evidence. It just removes the tool and waits to find out later what it cost.
Oklahoma City just showed the alternative, and it involved a real abuse case, not a hypothetical one. Police Chief Ron Bacy told the city council Tuesday his department had “incidents with two employees” misusing the Flock system. One was a sergeant, Keenan Heskett, who accessed the database for personal use for five months and drew a three-day suspension and a year of probation.
A second officer’s use of the system was found to have violated someone’s rights and drew corrective action. Bacy said this himself, on the record, before the council voted.
Rarchar Tortorello is Executive Editor of CityNewsOKC and CityNewsAmerica and the publication’s White House correspondent. He hosts The Patriot Sentinel podcast, covering Oklahoma politics and national affairs. A retired combat veteran and former Norman City Councilmember, Tortorello brings more than two decades of public service to his journalism. Follow him on X @Rarchar or contact him at rarchar@grellnermedia.com.
The council renewed the contract anyway, 5-3, extending the $270,000 annual deal covering 90 cameras through next June, but only after attaching real restrictions: every search logged to a specific user and tied to a stated reason, mandatory audits, retention cut from 30 days to seven, sole city authority over sharing data with federal agencies.
Mayor David Holt and council members Katrina Avers, Bradley Carter, Todd Stone and Matthew Hinkle voted yes. Ward 2’s James Cooper, Ward 6’s JoBeth Hamon and Ward 7’s Camal Pennington voted no, wanting the cameras gone. More than 2,200 residents had signed a petition to kill the contract outright.
The council chamber erupted in boos anyway.
That’s accountability handled through the front door instead of at 2 a.m. with a saw. Oklahoma City had a documented abuse case, a name, and a punishment attached to it, and the response was a public vote with restrictions written into the contract.
Flock’s critics aren’t wrong about everything. The Washington Post has tracked at least 50 officers nationwide accused of misusing these systems, including cases of tracking exes and current partners.
A Milwaukee officer searched his girlfriend’s plate 124 times.
A Pasadena, Texas, sergeant resigned after using the cameras to track a fellow officer.
Those cases are exactly why Oklahoma City wrote audits and logging requirements into its contract instead of trusting the department to police itself.
But there’s a difference between fixing a system and sabotaging it before anyone finds out whether it’s broken. Nobody who cut down the cameras near Memorial Elementary had evidence of abuse. They had an ideology and a saw, and a man who tried to put a child in his car is still free because of it.
Houston police are still looking for the man in the red sedan. They’re looking with less than they should have, because somebody in that city decided a camera pole mattered more than a nine-year-old’s safety, and never had to answer for that trade to the family living with it.
Oklahoma City just proved you can rein in Flock without a saw. Houston citizens chose the saw.
