Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed
Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal, then back to Wisconsin, where it is illegal. They then used his travel across state lines as tracked by Flock as part of the probable cause justification to search his car for weed; he was eventually arrested on marijuana possession charges, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media. The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges.
- ▪Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal, then back to Wisconsin, where it is illegal.
- ▪They then used his travel across state lines as tracked by Flock as part of the probable cause justification to search his car for weed; he was eventually arrested on marijuana possession charges, according to court records reviewed by 404
- ▪The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges.
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Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/cops-used-flock-to-track-a-man-across-state-lines-to-create-pretext-to-search-his-car-for-weed/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:50:49 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T14:55:41.828Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T14:55:41.828Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YN_K_im9m1ZI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Police in Wisconsin used Flock to determine that a man “travels to Michigan frequently,” where marijuana is legal, then back to Wisconsin, where it is illegal. They then used his travel across state lines as tracked by Flock as part of the probable cause justification to search his car for weed; he was eventually arrested on marijuana possession charges, according to court records reviewed by 404 Media. The searches came to light in a Wisconsin criminal complaint against Edward Abrams-Phillips, who was wanted for bail jumping on domestic violence charges. But the criminal complaint makes clear that beyond the bail jumping and domestic violence charges, police specifically studied Abrams-Phillips’ interstate travel to create the pretext for searching his car for marijuana.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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