With over 100,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sprouting out of the ground over the past few years, you might be tempted to ask: “with what money?”

Drug money, as it turns out, though it’s not exactly what you might think. A bombshell investigation by Mother Jones found that police departments across the US are using settlement money from the opioid crisis meant for struggling communities to instead fund Flock surveillance cameras.

All together, Mother Jones identified 19 agencies across ten different states which spent nearly $1 million of opioids settlement funds on ALPRs from companies like Flock and Axon (though the publication notes that’s almost certainly an undercount.)

The funding pipeline looks like this: after massive pharmaceutical firms agreed to pay out a combined $50 billion for their role in the opioid crisis, state agencies responsible for allocating those funds decided that police departments would make efficient use of the dough. Police agencies — which already account for one of the largest shares of municipal expenditures in the US overall — made a heartwarming pitch: send us that opioid money, and we’ll use it to buy new police toys and stamp out drug dealers.

As police departments across the US have made abundantly clear, ALPR systems are much better for stalking and harassing innocent civilians than they are for actually fighting crime. And when it comes to combatting the opioid crisis, specifically, there are perhaps few police toys less suited to the task.

“While $50 billion may seem like a lot of funds, once it’s divided up over 18 years and thousands of localities, a lot of places really aren’t getting that much, particularly given the scope of the crisis,” Robyn Oster, director of policy at the Partnership to End Addiction told Mother Jones. “Whatever funds you’re spending on a camera, you’re not spending on getting someone into treatment.”

Overall, it’s a slap in the face to anybody victimized by the man-made public health emergency that was — and still is — the opioid crisis. Rather than funding state-run rehab clinics or harm reduction campaigns, that money is being flushed away into AI surveillance cameras so that police can catch hardened criminals legally buying weed, or picking up petty cash from the ground.

“It’s just really not the way to make the most impact in addressing addiction,” Oster said.

More on Flock: Flock’s Network Is Losing Value to Cops as More and More of Its Cameras Go Offline