One of the biggest concerns gun owners, and frankly, Americans in general, have with Flock Safety cameras is the inevitable abuse by government officials. When you give agencies a tool that can track citizens with near‑total visibility, the temptation to misuse that power is guaranteed.
Flock cameras can follow a person’s movements across an entire city, even when they haven’t done a single thing wrong. And despite the repeated claims that the system “only reads license plates,” law enforcement agencies nationwide can access that data to track anyone they want.
As it turns out, Americans’ fears weren’t unfounded. Cops across the country have already been busted abusing Flock access. Here are just a few of the cases:
Jerome County Sheriff (Idaho) retired early after being caught using Flock to track his wife’s vehicle over 700 times, which he labeled as a “test” in the system. The Idaho AG’s office said there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges.
Three Fayetteville PD officers (Georgia) were placed on administrative leave for allegedly using Flock to track their own plates, and those of family and friends.
A Greene County deputy (Georgia) was arrested and fired for allegedly accessing Flock cameras outside his duties for nearly three months.
Three Cherokee County deputies (Georgia) were fired and arrested for allegedly misusing Flock cameras.
A DeKalb County deputy (Georgia) was fired and arrested for allegedly accessing Flock data. He now faces felony charges.
Two Greer PD officers (South Carolina) were fired for allegedly accessing Flock cameras outside their official scope of duty.
Five Albany deputies (Georgia) were arrested this month for allegedly violating their department’s Flock data policies.
A Costa Mesa police officer (California) has been accused of tracking his wife, mistress, and rivals using Flock cameras.
Pasadena PD (California) arrested and charged one of its officers for allegedly using Flock to track another officer.
This isn’t even close to every incident out there. But you have to ask: what in the world is happening in Georgia? Is the state a hotbed of abuse, or is Georgia simply the only place aggressively investigating officers who misuse Flock?
And how does an Idaho sheriff get to quietly retire after 700+ violations of Flock misuse?
For gun owners, the bigger concern is obvious: if these are just the cases that made the news, how many haven’t? How many violations were buried by departments? How many abuses never saw daylight? There are always more than we’ll ever know.
While departments keep insisting they want Flock cameras to “solve crime,” the pattern suggests something very different: these systems may be creating more criminals inside law enforcement than they’re catching outside it.
Note: This article first appeared in Gun News Now, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
Pocatello–Tomorrow at their weekly meeting, the group “Patriots for Liberty & Constitution” will continue discussing Marshall Foster’s book, The American Covenant. The plan for this week is to finish chapter 1 and begin chapter 2.
Effective immediately, all City of American Falls water customers are advised to boil all tap water before using it for drinking, cooking, preparing food, making ice, brushing teeth, washing fruits and vegetables, or giving it to pets.
This notice has been issued as a precaution after a loss of communication with the City’s water system caused a citywide loss of water pressure, with system pressures falling below the minimum safe operating level. A loss of water pressure can increase the risk of contaminants entering the water distribution system.
Until this notice is lifted, bring all water to a rolling boil for at least one (1) minute before use. Bottled water may also be used as an alternative.
City crews are on site and are actively working to restore and stabilize the water system. Water pressure is recovering, the distribution system is being flushed, and water quality testing is underway. This Boil Water Notice will remain in effect until testing confirms the water is safe for consumption.
We understand the inconvenience this causes and sincerely appreciate your patience and cooperation as we work to resolve this issue as quickly and safely as possible. Updates will be provided as additional information becomes available and when the Boil Water Notice has been lifted.
The Department of War has confirmed the identity of an active‑duty Soldier who was killed in action supporting overseas operations in Jordan, following positive identification by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.
Staff Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, N.Y., died on July 17, 2026, during an enemy attack at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, Jordan. The incident remains under investigation.
Staff Sgt. Rampersad was assigned to 1st Battalion, 57th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 52nd Air Defense Artillery Brigade, 10th Army Air & Missile Defense Command, Ansbach, Germany.
July 27, 2026 (Cover Photo Credit: City of Pocatello)
The City of Pocatello’s Road Construction & Traffic Report for the week of July 27, 2026, has been published and may be read here.
Highlights include:
Street sweepers are currently performing their regular sweeping schedule.
The Street Services crew will be patching potholes and curb lines throughout the City.
Crews will be jetting and cleaning sewer mainlines throughout the City.
Street Services will be fog sealing streets around the city; the schedule may be seen here.
Traffic signal work continues at the intersection of Quinn Rd. and Pole Line Rd.
Work continues on the water mainline replacement project on Gray Ave. and Howard Ave. between West Alameda Rd. and West Eldredge Rd.
Demolition of the Monarch Building continues.
Work continues on the Benton Street Bridge over the Portneuf River April 15, 2026. West Benton Street remains closed between South Hayes Avenue and South Grant Avenue. Construction is anticipated to be finished by the end of September, weather and other unforeseen conditions permitting.
South Garfield Avenue between Center Street and West Lewis Street will be closed from 2 PM to 9 PM on Mondays for Curbside Cravings.
South Garfield Avenue between Center Street and West Lewis Street will be closed from 2:00 PM to 9:00 PM on Wednesdays for the Bannock Civitan Club’s Revive @ 5 Summer Concerts.
South Garfield Avenue between Center Street and West Lewis Street will be closed from 6 AM to 3 PM every Saturday for the Portneuf Valley Farmers Market.
(Bannock County Press Release, July 24, 2026; Cover Photo Credit: Bannock County)
Bannock County Commissioners Meetings, July 27-31, 2026
Monday, July 27, 2026:
10:00 AM Follow-up discussion regarding the FY27 budget with possible Executive Session regarding personnel with potential action following Executive Session (action item)
Tuesday, July 28, 2026:
9:00 AM Business Meeting (action items)
10:00 AM Follow-up discussion regarding the FY27 budget with possible Executive Session regarding personnel with potential action following Executive Session (action item)
1:30 PM Follow-up discussion regarding the FY27 budget with possible Executive Session regarding personnel with potential action following Executive Session (action item)
Wednesday, July 29, 2026:
There are no meetings scheduled at this time.
Thursday, July 30, 2026:
9:00 AM Work Session and Claims Meeting (action items)
The Work Session Agenda will be updated on Monday, July 27, 2026.
Friday, July 31, 2026:
There are no meetings scheduled at this time.
(The information packets for the business meeting and work session can be found at http://www.bannockcounty.gov. Scroll down and click on “Agendas and Minutes” then click on the information packet for the meeting that you are interested in.)
About BOCC Meetings
The Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) is comprised of the three elected County Commissioners: Ernie Moser (District 1, Chair), Jeff Hough (District 2), and Ken Bullock (District 3).
The BOCC generally meets twice a week: regular business meetings are on Tuesdays at 9:00 a.m. and work sessions are on Thursdays at 9:00 a.m. Meetings are generally held in the Commissioner’s Chambers at 624 E Center, Room 212, Pocatello, Idaho, unless otherwise noted. Times subject to change within 15 minutes of stated time.
During these meetings, the BOCC may: approve contracts, expend funds, hear testimony, make decisions on land use cases and take care of other County matters, and are open to the public.
New recruits and seasoned veterans on my leadership team are often surprised to learn the job comes with homework…and a book club.
The level of enthusiasm varies, but no one gets a pass.
Since my days as Chief Deputy Clerk in Ada County, every leader on my team has been asked to read Thanks for the Feedback,written by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. At first glance, it seems like an odd choice. It’s not a book about management or strategy. It’s about something much harder: learning how to receive feedback well.
Most of us are pretty good at giving advice. Receiving it is another story.
Better Together
None of us enjoys hearing we could have handled something better. Our instinct is to explain ourselves or defend our decisions. But if we’re unwilling to listen, we’re unlikely to grow.
That’s part of why reading matters so much to me and why we read this book as a group. General James Mattis, who I had the chance to meet years ago, once put it simply: the trouble with being too busy to read is that you learn everything the hard way. He said, “By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work, where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.”
Every election, every project, and every conversation with Idahoans teaches us something. Improvement doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when people are willing to listen, learn, and speak up with ideas that make us better.
Good leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing them.
Happy, Honest
That’s why we’ve worked to build a culture where feedback isn’t something to avoid. It’s something to value.
In our office, we call it our “Happy, Honest” approach. It’s the standard we hold ourselves to every day: Be Helpful. Be Open. Practice Patience. Keep It Simple. Build Trust.
Those values aren’t just how we serve Idahoans. They’re how we work together. We celebrate successes, learn from mistakes, survive long election nights with the occasional shot of hot sauce, and keep asking how we can do better.
An office is only as good as its people. If we’re willing to listen, learn, and grow together, we’ll be better equipped to serve the people of Idaho.
Government works best when the people inside it never stop learning.
That’s the kind of culture we’re working to build, a culture that’s always listening, always improving, and always focused on serving Idahoans better than we did yesterday.
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers.
It’s about creating an environment where people are encouraged to find better ones.
Phil McGrane
ABOUT SECRETARY PHIL McGRANE
Phil McGrane was elected Idaho’s twenty-eighth Secretary of State and took office on January 2, 2023. McGrane served as elected Clerk of Ada County from 2019-2022.McGrane holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, a juris doctorate, and a Master of Public Administration. As a fourth-generation Idahoan, Phil has dedicated his career to making elections in the state of Idaho accessible, secure and transparent.
July 24, 2026 (Cover Image Credit: Gem State Chronicle)
IACI vs IFF
There was a time when there was little daylight between business interests and concerns for individual liberty within the Republican Party. President Dwight Eisenhower’s pick for Secretary of Defense, former General Motors president Charles Wilson, famously said, “What’s good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” President Ronald Reagan lauded the virtues of free market capitalism in contrast to the encroaching tyranny of government regulation. Many current Idaho leaders have built their political philosophy on that foundation, even as the zeitgeist has shifted in recent years. Over the past two decades, conservative Republicans have watched big businesses outsource jobs overseas, adopt woke ideologies including BLM and LGBTQ+ activism, and attempt to force vaccine mandates on employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This has created a divide within Republican circles between those who still believe that what’s good for big business is good for the country and those who view corporate America with increasing skepticism. Someone like Gov. Brad Little—successful businessman, longtime political figure, and former chairman of the Idaho Association of Commerce & Industry (IACI)—sees big business as an ally in carrying out his agenda and views the state’s economic situation as his top priority. Just look at the governor’s press releases and op-ed from the past week alone:
To be fair, the economy is very important. We all need to feed our families and put roofs over our heads, which means good jobs, low inflation, and affordable housing. I think we sometimes take for granted how well we have it here in Idaho, and the governor and his policies deserve much of the credit.
Nevertheless, a strain of conservatism has emerged over the past two decades that believes economic prosperity is only part of the story. The populism that has underlain the Trump era sees government and corporations as twin villains rather than casting one as the hero of the story. This dichotomy can be illustrated by two different lobbying organizations in the state: IACI and the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF). There’s a certain state senator who, whenever he wants to emphasize the breadth of buy-in he’s sought for a piece of legislation, says he talked to both the IACI folks and the IFF folks.
I wrote about IACI in detail last December, so check out that article for some background. IFF probably needs no introduction for regular readers. It was founded in 2009 by Wayne Hoffman and Heather Lauer, building on the work of liberty stalwarts Ralph Smeed and Maurice Clements. Its original mission was to present policymakers with free market solutions while holding elected officials accountable for expanding government regulations and spending. Former state representative Ron Nate succeeded Hoffman as president of IFF in 2024, while Alex LaBeau has served as president of IACI since 2006.
While the two organizations were often on opposite sides of issues before COVID, it seemed to be during the pandemic that they to drew much harder lines in the sand. IACI supported Gov. Little’s stay-at-home order, along with mask and vaccine mandates, while IFF took both government and corporations to task for infringing on individual rights. IFF’s sister organization, Idaho Freedom PAC, endorsed Ammon Bundy for governor.
Both organizations publish legislative scorecards, though their scope and methodology are quite different. Back in 2023, IFF president Ron Nate wrote an article breaking down the differences between the two scorecards. He noted that there was only one bill scored by both organizations during the 2023 session:
Of the hundreds of bills rated in the Idaho Freedom Index, and the nine bills on the IACI scorecard, there was only one bill scored in agreement: H292, the property tax reduction bill by Rep. Monks and supported by Speaker Moyle. The bill was a modest decrease in property taxes by using general funds to offset property tax needs by local governments.
…
No legislator scoring above 90 percent on the Idaho FREEDOM Index scored above 50 percent on the IACI Scorecard. While the Freedom Index works for the forgotten man, the IACI scorecard works against the little guy. There is nothing conservative about pulling the levers of government in favor of the vested special interests of big corporations.
The graph below says it all; there is a distinct inverse relationship between legislators’ scores on the Idaho Freedom Index versus the IACI Scorecard. IACI works against freedom, period. It is a worthless, self-serving measure of just some of the garbage a big special interest lobby can produce. Idahoans deserve better.
I’ve written several times not only about the scorecards but also about the dueling endorsements of the organizations’ sister PACs—IACI’s Idaho Prosperity Fund and IFF’s Idaho Freedom PAC. This week, I took a closer look at the correlation between the two scorecards that Nate mentioned three years ago. In 2024, the two scorecards remained strongly negatively correlated, to the tune of -0.87. A high score on one almost certainly meant a low score on the other. By 2025, that correlation had weakened to -0.74, and it declined further in 2026 to -0.50.
I’m still not entirely sure what is causing this decrease in negative correlation. To learn more, I fed the last three years of IACI scores, IFF scores, legislator ratings on both metrics, and the final status of every bill from 2024 through 2026 into Claude to see what other patterns it could identify. The biggest finding that caught my eye was how many bills in 2026 never made it to the Senate floor. It wasn’t just immigration bills that were blocked, either by being voted down in Senate committees or unilaterally held by committee chairs. According to this analysis, 135 bills met their end in Senate State Affairs alone—40 more than the second-place committee.
When I last wrote about IACI versus IFF, I questioned why the organization had endorsed challengers to Sens. Glenneda Zuiderveld and Josh Kohl despite each earning a score of 75 by IACI’s own metrics:
The average IACI score of incumbents facing IPF-endorsed challengers is 55.7, only slightly lower than the average for IPF-endorsed incumbents. These scores range from Sen. Dan Foreman, who is being challenged by Rep. McCann and scored just 33, to Sens. Josh Kohl and Glenneda Zuiderveld, who each scored 75. IPF nevertheless endorsed their respective challengers, Brent Reinke and Casey Swensen.
I think that question has now been answered. The issues IACI cared most about never made it to the Senate floor in the first place, so they never appeared on the scorecard. However, the organization and its PAC took them into account when making endorsements.
Another interesting data point is how successful each organization was at passing or killing legislation. In 2026, 47.5% of introduced bills were ultimately passed and signed by the governor. Both organizations posted lower success rates than that baseline on bills they supported—39.2% for IFF and 38.5% for IACI. However, their success rates were much higher when opposing legislation. Of the bills IFF opposed, 74.7% were ultimately defeated, while IACI’s figure was 87%. It is clearly easier for lobbyists and policy organizations to kill bills they dislike than it is to pass bills they support. That makes sense: for a bill to become law, it must be printed, pass two legislative committees, pass both chambers, and be signed by the governor. Killing a bill requires stopping it at only one of those stages.
In 2023, Ron Nate noted that IACI and IFF went head-to-head on only one bill. My analysis shows that in 2026 they disagreed on 14 bills, with IACI winning 11 of those clashes. IACI also had the upper hand in 2025 by a margin of 9-6 and in 2024 by a margin of 12-5. IACI, of course, has a much deeper pool of resources than IFF. Big businesses are willing to pay bigly to support an organization that lobbies on their behalf, while IFF relies primarily on donations from individuals and a handful of companies that favor free markets over subsidies and government intervention.
When I fed this data into Claude, it built me—without my even asking—a comprehensive dashboard based on the data. I’m sharing that with you now. Check it out and see what you find. I plan to continue adding more data and teasing out additional conclusions about the legislative process and how conservatives can become more effective at implementing policy.
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Gem State Chronicle. I encourage our readers to visit their website and consider subscribing. Find this and other informative articles at the Gem State Chronicle here: About – Gem State Chronicle
