A police officer who spoke out against his department's adoption of Flock surveillance cameras was investigated by his own agency five separate times in under two years.
According to Wired, officer Noel Pichardo raised concerns after his city embraced Flock's camera network. In the two years that followed, he became the subject of five internal affairs investigations. Wired's report doesn't detail the substance of each probe, only that there were five of them in that timeframe. That's a lot of internal scrutiny for one person.
Internal affairs investigations exist to address officer misconduct, not to punish officers for public criticism. Five probes landing on one cop within two years of him questioning a surveillance vendor his department adopted is the kind of pattern that invites scrutiny on its own, whatever the individual findings turned out to be. It's also a reminder that resistance to expanding police surveillance tech doesn't only come from outside activists and city council debates. Sometimes it comes from an officer inside the building, and it can cost him.
Whether the five investigations were coincidence, retaliation, or some mix of both isn't something the available reporting settles. But the timeline alone, criticism first, scrutiny after, is why this case is worth watching.