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If this isn’t an indictment on America’s hatred of Flock cameras, we don’t know what is.
On Wednesday, a grand jury in Ohio refused to bring felony charges against a Clermont County man accused of destroying a Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR).
In June, police in the Cincinnati suburb of Union Township arrested Cody Morelock, accusing him of removing bolts on the ALPR pole, toppling it over, and ultimately destroying the surveillance camera and its solar panel.
The prosecution’s case seemed iron-clad: according to Cincinnati’s Local12, police identified Morelock using surveillance footage from multiple nearby cameras, combined with info gleamed from a credit card and a customer rewards account. Despite the evidence against him, the jury declined to indict Morelock, resulting in all charges being dropped.
It’s a searing referendum on the state’s ability to prosecute alleged incidents of ALPR vandalism, as grand juries almost always bring charges against the accused. As New York Court of Appeals chief judge Sol Wachtler once infamously declared, “any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
That said, the outcome in this case is likely more the result of Flock’s horrible reputation than any error by the prosecution. Flock’s ALPRs are exceedingly unpopular across every swath of the political spectrum, and nearly every new case of vandalism comes with a wave of support on social media for the accused. With the charges against Morelock dropped, it seems that phenomenon isn’t just limited to viral moments, but is increasingly spilling out into the real world.
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