🚨 2 DAYS LEFT 🚨
@GovRonDeSantis ordered ALL automated license plate readers removed from state road rights-of-way by Sept. 30.
Instead, some sheriffs’ offices are simply MOVING them.
In Polk County, Flock cameras were moved onto private property while still scanning vehicles on a state road.
Other counties removed Flock cameras and found numerous unpermitted cameras nobody knows who owns.
The deadline is 2 days away.
In 1884, a nineteen year old with a badge he made himself held off roughly eighty armed men for a day and a half from inside a mud hut in New Mexico.
They fired an estimated four thousand rounds into it and threw dynamite on the roof. On the second morning, he made coffee and tortillas.
His name was Elfego Baca, and he was from Socorro.
The trouble was in a settlement called Frisco, out in western New Mexico Territory. Texas cowboys working the big ranches around it had spent months terrorizing the Mexican American families who lived there. Among other things, ranch hands had tortured and maimed a local man in a cantina. Nothing happened to anyone, because the law in that county did not exist for those residents.
A deputy named Pedro Sarracino was talking about the situation back in Socorro. Baca, who was nineteen and had no commission of any kind, told him that if he would take him along to Frisco, Baca would make himself a self made deputy.
Then he did exactly that. He got himself a badge and rode out.
In the fall of 1884 a drunk Slaughter ranch hand named Charlie McCarty was waving a pistol around in a bar and shot Baca's hat off his head. Baca disarmed him and arrested him.
The cowboys came for him in a group, led by the Slaughter foreman, a man named Young Parham. In the confrontation Parham's horse was shot out from under him and came down on top of him and killed him.
That turned an arrest into a war.
Baca took cover in a jacal, a small hut built of mud and sticks, belonging to a man named Geronimo Armijo. About eighty cowboys surrounded it.
What saved his life was the architecture. The floor of that hut was dug about eighteen inches below ground level. So while thousands of rounds went straight through the mud walls, Baca was lying below the line of them, firing back out through the doorway.
It ran about thirty six hours. They shot the building apart. They set fire to part of it. They threw dynamite onto the roof and brought down a corner of the structure.
On the second morning the men outside smelled coffee brewing and fresh tortillas cooking, because there was a stove in there and Baca was making himself breakfast.
When it ended, four of them were dead and eight were wounded. Baca did not have a scratch on him. When people went inside afterward they found a plaster statue of a saint standing intact in the wreckage.
He refused to surrender until he got terms. He wanted to be tried in Socorro rather than locally, and he wanted to keep both of his pistols for the ride. He got both.
He was tried for murder and acquitted. His defense hauled in the door of Geronimo Armijo's house and stood it up in the courtroom. It had more than four hundred bullet holes in it.
And then Elfego Baca went and had an entire second life.
He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1894. Over the years he was a deputy US marshal, a county clerk, a school superintendent, a district attorney, a mayor, and the sheriff of Socorro County.
His method as sheriff was the best thing about him. Instead of riding out after wanted men, he mailed them letters. Each one gave a date and explained that if the man had not come in by then, Baca would consider him to be resisting arrest and would come and get him personally.
Most of them just turned themselves in.
He later got mixed up in the Mexican Revolution, acted as the US representative for Victoriano Huerta's government, and in 1915 stood trial for conspiracy over a Mexican general's escape from jail. Acquitted again.
He died in Albuquerque in 1945.
In the late 1950s Walt Disney turned the whole thing into a television serial, which made a Mexican American kid from Socorro, New Mexico arguably the first Hispanic pop culture hero in America.
And on the day that actually happened, he was not a deputy at all.
He had appointed himself, made his own badge, and gone out there because nobody else was going to.
One and done fence posts, and dimensional building material.
This is peak American ingenuity.
https://t.co/W4KMQmArFs
6052025192
This is what I will be building all my fences out of from here on out, and I got deck ideas for his 2x6 and 4x8 sheet.
Hit this guy up, he is just like us, This dude is Henry Ford level genius.
Flock camera pings the wrong Durango, and 23 year-old woman spends 13 days in jail for a crash she didn’t cause.
Lindsey Brooke Isaacs was 23, asleep in her Palm Coast apartment, when Florida Highway Patrol troopers pounded on the door. They told her her black Dodge Durango had killed three people on I-4 near DeBary on October 4, 2025. A motorcyclist and Flagler County official Jorge Salinas and his wife.
She said they had the wrong person. Her SUV was almost new. No crash damage. She asked them to show her the damage. They wouldn’t let her look. They towed the car anyway.
What they had was a Flock automated license plate reader hit.
A camera three miles west of the wreck logged her plate at 9:51 p.m. The crash was around 9:53. That timing should have cleared her, as she was already past the scene. Instead, it became the case.
Witnesses and a 911 caller described a maroon Durango and a partial plate starting 458. Struck vehicles had maroon paint. Isaacs’ plate was RJVN10. Her Durango was black. Investigators searched Flock for a black Durango anyway, locked onto the first one they found, and ran with it.
They alleged “marks consistent with a collision.” Photos of the car in the impound lot later showed no such damage. They never pulled the event data recorder that would have shown no collision. They omitted the maroon description and the timing from the story that put her in handcuffs.
April 17, 2026: arrest warrant. Eight felonies, including three counts of vehicular homicide. Held without bond. Thirteen days in Volusia County Jail, including solitary, she later told the Senate, in a cell with feces on the walls. Facing what she was told could be life.
April 29: $250,000 bond.
May 22: prosecutors drop every charge. Same day, they arrest Alisa Lee Montalvo of Deltona who owned a maroon Durango, plate beginning 458, damage that actually matches.
Isaacs is suing the two FHP sergeants who built the case. This week she testified in the U.S. Senate about Flock’s nationwide ALPR network.