Texas police accused of using surveillance data to hunt woman over abortion

Authorities in Texas used surveillance data to track down a woman who performed a self-managed abortion. Deputies and the surveillance companies then tried to cover their tracks.

Johnson County Sheriff Adam King continually asserted that requests for automated license plate reader (ALPR) data were needed to track down a missing person.

The sheriff claimed that the woman was being searched and that the data was needed to check on her safety.

However, a sworn affidavit seen by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy foundation, says otherwise, with new information showing that the sheriff wanted to hunt down a woman who had performed a self-managed abortion.

The company that provides license plate recognition (LPR) technology for law enforcement, Flock Safety, also doubled down on the sheriff’s claims and discredited media reports that authorities used the tech for a “death investigation.”

“Recently, there has been misreporting that a Texas police officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office used LPR “to target people seeking reproductive healthcare. According to the Sheriff himself, the reporting is unequivocally false,” Flock Safety said.

Flock Safety does reference the self-administered abortion in its update, saying that “a local family called and said their relative had self-administered an abortion, and then she ran away.”

However, the company claims that the police were searching for the woman because her family feared that she might be hurt.

Although Flock Safety and the sheriff's office tried to downplay the situation, the responding officer's affidavit reveals that various claims made by authorities weren’t exactly true.

Cybernews has reached out to Flock Safety and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office for comment.

The media reported back in May that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office investigated the whereabouts of a woman in a nationwide search that used 83,000 ALPR cameras. The reason for the search was logged as “had an abortion, search for female.”

However, Flock Safety and authorities claimed that they were looking for a woman after a large amount of blood was found at the scene, and they wanted to “check on her welfare,” EFF said.

The digital privacy foundation claims that the new documents contradict these claims, as the affidavit describes the incident as a “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus.”

“These documents also undermine the claim that the ALPR search was in response to a medical emergency, since, in fact, the abortion had occurred more than two weeks before deputies were called to investigate,” EFF said.

In April, the subject of the investigation took medication to induce an abortion. Two weeks later, her romantic partner filed a police report, which contained evidence including images, the FedEx envelope the medication came in, and instructions on how to take the medication.

A sheriff ran two official searches through the ALPR database with the note "had an abortion, search for female," according to data obtained by EFF from Flock Safety.

The first search looked into over 1,200 Flock Safety networks composed of over 17,000 different cameras.

The second search, exposed by 404 media, comprised a whole month's worth of data across almost 7,000 networks, including over 83,000 cameras.

Both of these searches were listed by the same case numbers, which had the note death investigation/incident report, according to EFF.

Once all the evidence had been collected and searches had been made, the investigators consulted the district attorney's office. They were later told they were not allowed to press charges against the woman.

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