On Dec. 13 last year, a stranger in a Brown University bathroom noticed a man dressed head to toe in black, wrong for the weather, mere hours before that same man opened fire on Brown University’s campus, killing two and wounding eight before vanishing. Investigators had almost nothing: no name, no plate, just a tip describing a gray Nissan with Florida plates. But that was enough: Providence police ran it through a network of more than 70 Flock Safety cameras, which reached back through 30 days of history, and found the car had passed 14 times since December 1st. “We were able to find the vehicle on Flocks, actually get the actual plate, learn that it was a car rental,” said the Providence police chief. Police tracked the car thanks to Flock and traced him to a storage unit in New Hampshire less than a week after the shooting.
Somewhere in Florida, at almost the same time, a different man was looking into Flock-collected data, but for an entirely different reason. Officer Christopher Goodson wasn’t hunting a stranger, but was watching for his estranged wife. Using his department’s access to Flock, he logged more than 700 unauthorized inquiries into her vehicle between Sept. 2024 and June 2026, and was arrested just last week.
