"Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime" 7 October 2025

In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. Flock itself said “she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

But newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime with the District Attorney’s office on the same day that they performed the Flock search. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and shared with 404 Media, also show that the Flock search was performed more than two weeks after the woman had the abortion. The documents were created as part of an arrest affidavit against the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her at gunpoint on the day she took the abortion pill...

...“For months, Flock Safety and the Johnson County Sheriff insisted that she was being searched for as a missing person and accused journalists and advocates of spreading 'clickbait' misinformation,” Rin Alajaji, legislative activist at the EFF, told 404 Media. “Now we have the official records, and they prove the exact opposite: Texas deputies did investigate this woman's abortion as a ‘death investigation,’ they did use Flock Safety’s ALPR network to track her down, and they did consult prosecutors about charging her. The only misinformation came from the company and the sheriff trying to cover their tracks. We’ve warned about this for over a decade now: when a single search can access more than 83,000 cameras across nearly the entire country, the potential for abuse is enormous. This makes it crystal clear that neither the companies profiting from this technology nor the agencies deploying it can be trusted to tell the full story about how it's being used.”..

...Flock declined to comment for this article...