Texas Cop Uses ALPR to Search Nationwide for Woman Suspected of Having an Abortion

On 9 May 2025, an officer in the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas used Automatic License Plate Recognition provided by the company Flock to search nationwide for a woman believed to have self-administered an abortion.

The woman was eventually found and contacted in the Dallas, Texas area. Almost all abortions are illegal in Texas.

The search included states where abortion is legal. The reason given when pulling search datasets was “had an abortion, search for female.” The search tapped 6,809 Flock networks with 83,345 cameras over about a month. It was noticed in audits of Flock access in Washington state and Illinois, where abortion is legal.

ALPR is normally intended to be used against carjacking or to find missing people. The sheriff in this instance claimed the woman’s family were concerned about her safety.

A research report published by the reproductive rights group If/When/How noted “about a quarter of adult cases (26%) were reported to law enforcement by acquaintances entrusted with information, such as friends, parents, or intimate partners.”

Elizabeth Ling, senior counsel for If/When/How, told 404 Media:

Self-managed abortion is extremely safe. What we have found in our work and our research is that the greatest risk posed to people self-managing their abortion is state violence and criminalization. I understand wanting to keep your loved ones safe. When people have died from pregnancy or from being denied an abortion, it makes sense that people are scared that they could lose a loved one. But, when police and prosecutors have wrongly investigated and punished people for their abortion or pregnancy loss it is equally fair to fear criminalization if police are aware of your abortion. All of this shows why it is essential for people to have access to accurate information about their options and legal risk. Because no one should face criminalization for their abortion.

We hear this every day on the helpline, there is an overwhelming fear that they’re being watched and tracked by the state, whether that’s through their internet history or through traveling. There have been multiple court decisions within the abortion context reaffirming the right to travel, but you have law enforcement agencies utilizing tools to extend their reach outside of their jurisdiction to surveil and try to find people. Even if that doesn’t ultimately result in an actual criminal prosecution, that is still a complete invasion of someone’s privacy and it increases people’s fear.

Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund told 404 Media:

One of the biggest issues that has emerged in the post-Dobbs era is there’s all these things that are possible in terms of how people might use the tools available to go after abortion seekers or surveil abortion seekers but then you’re not sure which ones are actually going to be used. Knowing this helps us hone in what tools in the field law enforcement is actually using.

“We saw the groundwork for this laid pretty early. You had anti-abortion activists doing surveillance of abortion clinics, license plates, the people driving in and out, but they would stand in the parking lot with pen and paper writing down license plates. When you have this legacy of manual surveillance and then a large tech company offers this type of surveillance as a service, those same tactics, techniques, and customers coming from an antiabortion legacy are handed these automated tools handed on a silver platter, it’s shocking to see it but also it felt inevitable.

Past experience shows such tools do not stay in the hands of authorities. Activists seeking to shut down access to abortion have for decades collected records of license plate number for women attending clinics and volunteers assisting the women to get through picket lines. Starting in at least the 1980s, through contacts in law enforcement they have used the license numbers illicitly to find out the identities of the vehicle’s owner despite laws limiting access to such databases, then used public records to find addresses and phone numbers not only of the owners but of their parents for harassment.

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