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In May of this year, North Texas law enforcement officials utilized thousands of license plate surveillance cameras in an attempt to find and prosecute a woman who had recently had an abortion, despite repeated claims that the query had merely been a welfare check, new information shows.
According to records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, authorities in Johnson County initiated the “death investigation” of a “non-viable fetus” after being called to a Burleson home where a man told officers that he believed a local woman had taken oral abortion medications. Officers were then shown evidence of what the man thought was a fetus.
Within hours, officers utilized over 83,000 license plate cameras made by the surveillance company Flock to attempt to find the woman. The database found several hits in Dallas, where the woman was later found, EFF reports. The reason for the search listed within the Flock database by local authorities was, “had an abortion, search for female.”
At the time, Johnson County Sheriff Adam King — who has since been indicted on unrelated perjury and workplace sexual harassment charges — denied that the license plate readers were used to investigate the abortion, stating that detectives had instead been searching for the woman as a missing person and were hoping to ensure her safety. King told The Dallas Morning News that the woman “was not under investigation at any point.”
EFF, though, reports that the Johnson County sheriff’s department did attempt to gather evidence of the abortion and move forward with criminal charges, but was told by the local district attorney that the charges would not be allowable by state law.
Furthermore, the sheriff’s office has told the media that “a large amount of blood” was found at the home officers were called to.
“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,” King told 404 Media, the outlet that broke the story. In a statement to The Dallas Morning News, he added: “We were just trying to check on her welfare and get her to the doctor if needed, or to the hospital.”
In actuality, the woman had taken the medication two weeks prior, and an investigator who was on the scene did not document finding any blood or take any blood samples into evidence. Multiple reports obtained by EFF described the Johnson County Sheriff Department’s search as a “death investigation,” which was not closed until June. The woman later accused the man who called law enforcement on her of domestic violence, and those charges remain pending.
The Johnson County case gained national attention, despite Flock Safety claiming that reporting around the license plate camera searches was “unequivocally false.”
“No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime,” Flock posted to its website in a blog titled, “Upholding Transparency and Trust in Public Safety Technology.”
But skeptics worried that the Johnson County Sheriff Department’s use of the cameras signaled a growing willingness to criminalize abortion, utilizing a growing law enforcement surveillance network to do so.
In 2022, if/when/how published a report that found between 2000 and 2020 (prior to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade), there were 61 cases in 26 states of people being criminally investigated or arrested for self-managing an abortion, whether their own or someone else’s. Law enforcement considered applying murder or homicide charges in 43% of those instances, the report found.
While a self-managed abortion isn’t criminal in Texas, the state legislature has cleared other avenues to crack down on abortion-inducing medications such as mifepristone. A law passed by the legislature in September will allow private residents to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, mails or provides abortion medication to Texas, starting Dec. 4.
On Wednesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that eight people had been arrested in Houston and indicted on charges of illegally performing an abortion and practicing without a license. Paxton has also attempted to legally pursue charges against out-of-state practitioners assisting Texas women with terminating their pregnancies.
