She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down.
She Got an Abortion. So A Texas Cop Used 83,000 Cameras to Track Her Down.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45678297
In a chilling sign of how far law enforcement surveillance has encroached on personal liberties, 404 Media recently revealed that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. The officer searched 6,809 different camera networks maintained by surveillance tech company Flock Safety, including states where abortion access is protected by law, such as Washington and Illinois. The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.”
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It's very telling that nothing close to mainstream news has covered this.
This headline makes it sound like the police hunted someone down for having an abortion, but in fact the woman's family reported her missing, and the police used this database to try to locate her in that capacity. The potential for misuse is certainly there, but isn't what happened here
Why did she "go missing" ?
Because she needed privacy to get an abortion from the police in Texas.
Why didn't she want to tell her family where she was ?
Because it would implicate them in her having an abortion which is her right.
Her abortion is not Texas' nor her family's business. And making excuses for that dynamic is white knighting authoritarian abuses.
Her family knew she had had an abortion before reaching out to the sheriff's office. When reporting her missing, the family told the sheriff's office about the abortion and their concern about her physical safety, which is why he listed that as the reason he needed to locate her in the database.
So she did tell her family, then went out of communication for days, and her family, who was worried about her, issued a "request to locate," which has a police department attempt to verify someone's safety. Once they established phone contact with the woman and verified she was safe, the entire thing was over.
If someone you love suddenly goes incommunicado like this and you're worried about them, you have the same right to issue a "request to locate" and have the police attempt to verify they're alright.
Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman self-administered the abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.”
“We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion,” he said. “It was about her safety.”
He said the search “got a couple hits on her on Flocks in Dallas,” but Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding her. Two days later the Sheriff’s Office was able to establish contact with the woman and verify she was okay, he added.
The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.”