🔍 Every Documented Misuse of ALPR and Flock Cameras

How many ALPR cameras are in use in the US?

Flock Safety operates somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 devices across more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, performing over 20 billion scans a month. Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows how normalised this became before anyone was watching: roughly 90% of sheriffs' offices with 500+ deputies use ALPR, and 100% of police departments serving over a million residents. EFF's analysis found that more than 99.9% of collected data is unconnected to any crime; a Palo Alto portal showed under 0.5% of captures were hotlist-related. A 2020 California State Auditor review found only 0.1% of LAPD's 320 million stored images matched a hotlist.

1. Do police officers use ALPRs to stalk people?

The most-documented category, and the one that recurs across every vendor and jurisdiction. IJ attorney Michael Soyfer, who represents residents suing San Jose and Norfolk: "The fundamental problem with these systems is that they place private information about people's movements over time in the hands of every officer… that predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners."

A note on what this table is: allegations, charges and convictions are not the same thing, and the outcome column says which is which. Several officers resigned or retired with no prosecution at all — Jerome County's sheriff was cleared of any crime by Idaho's Attorney General. IJ found that six of the original fourteen never faced consequences.

2. The film-set case: Lamar Roman

Worth telling in full, because it shows how many systems one impulse can chain together. On 3 February 2026, Monroe County deputy Lamar Eliseo Roman, 28 and married, was working security on the set of Apple TV+'s Bad Monkey in the Florida Keys. A 27-year-old woman arrived as a background performer. He catcalled her — "Oh my god, why didn't nobody tell me we were bringing models to set?" — and told her, "I need your name and number just in case I pull you over some day." She said she had a boyfriend.

He told investigators: "It's a tough month and I saw a shiny thing," and admitted he knew it was illegal. He was arrested on 10 March 2026 on three third-degree felony counts of misusing a law enforcement database, and fired. The woman declined to press charges; the department charged him anyway. He entered a two-year pretrial intervention agreement — if he completes it, the charges are dismissed.

Not to be confused with: Akron, Ohio sergeant Eric Paull, who used the Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway to run searches on ex-girlfriend Alexis Dekany, her mother and men close to her. He pleaded guilty in 2015 to aggravated assault, menacing by stalking and unauthorised database use, and was sentenced to four years. Dekany was a criminal justice student, not an actress. Paull is the stronger conviction; Roman is the ALPR case.

3. Did Flock employees watch cameras in children's spaces?

Public records obtained by Dunwoody resident Jason Hunyar showed Flock Safety employees accessing cameras in children's spaces at the Marcus Jewish Community Center — to demo the product to prospective police buyers. On 23 July 2025, Flock's Randy Gluck viewed cameras labelled "Gym Mendel – 1" and "Main Pool Right." On 30 September 2025, Vice President Bob Carter accessed the "Gymnastics" camera.

CEO Garrett Langley personally apologised for "poor judgement" and Flock agreed to stop using Dunwoody footage for demonstrations. Mayor Lynn Deutsch: "we will no longer be a demonstration location for Flock." The city renewed its contract anyway in April 2026.

4. Johnson County, Texas: 83,345 cameras to find one woman

Reported by 404 Media in May 2025; records later obtained by EFF filled in what the first story couldn't. Deputies ran two searches under a single case number, logged against a "death investigation" of a "non-viable fetus":

Sheriff Adam King told 404 Media the family "was worried that she was going to bleed to death." EFF's records complicate that account: deputies had already collected evidence, had asked the district attorney about charging her, and had been told they could not. The abortion had occurred more than two weeks earlier. The search reached states where abortion is legal — Washington and Illinois cameras appear in the logs (Yakima, Prosser, Mount Prospect). Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias said it violated Illinois law.

The ending is rarely reported: the woman later came to the sheriff's office herself — to report that the partner who had reported her abortion had assaulted her at gunpoint. He was charged. Sheriff King was subsequently charged with an unrelated felony sex offence.

5. Can an ALPR misread get you stopped at gunpoint?

IJ documented at least 26 cases since 2018 — most since 2023 — of innocent motorists stopped, detained at gunpoint or jailed because of ALPR error. In nearly two-thirds, officers didn't realise until after they'd drawn their guns.

6. Is ALPR data used for immigration enforcement?

• The "side door" (404 Media, May 2025): 4,000+ Flock lookups run by local police on ICE's behalf — giving federal agents access with no contract and no paper trail of their own.
• Washington: The UW Center for Human Rights found at least eight agencies enabled direct sharing with Border Patrol in 2025, and CBP had "back door" access to at least ten more that had never authorised it.
• San Francisco (Javorsky v. Flock, filed Feb 2026): alleges out-of-state agencies searched SFPD's database 1.6 million times in six months, and agencies from 48 states searched Los Altos's database over a million times — in violation of California's SB 34. Seeks $2,500 per violation.
• Dayton, Ohio: An audit found Flock cameras searched 7,100+ times for immigration purposes against city policy. The city suspended the data and physically covered the cameras with black bin bags, calling the searches "egregious violations."
• Illinois: Giannoulias's August 2025 audit found CBP accessing Illinois data despite a 2024 law barring plate data for immigration or abortion enforcement.
• The ICE hotlist: EFF found Flock lets agencies subscribe to ICE's NCIC "Immigration Violator" file — 700,000+ administrative warrants with no judicial review. Sparks PD (NV) had it enabled while listing immigration enforcement as a prohibited use.
• Vigilant/LEARN: An ACLU investigation found 80+ departments had configured sharing with ICE, often in likely violation of local policy — years before Flock existed.

7. "hehehe": the audit logs

Flock requires a reason for each search. It is a free-text box. The ACLU of Massachusetts found that in September 2025 alone, one Oregon department entered "investigation" 111 times and "hehehe" 20 times. Both were accepted. The ACLU of Wisconsin found Milwaukee police typed "investigation" over 1,000 times in 2025.

California's State Auditor examined four agencies in 2020 — LAPD, Fresno PD, Sacramento County SO, Marin County SO — and found "little to no auditing," deficient policies, over-retention and indiscriminate sharing. Its warning, five years before Johnson County: agencies "could misuse ALPR images to stalk an individual or observe vehicles at… clinics and political rallies."

8. How secure are ALPR cameras?

9. What Flock told the customers

The ACLU's July 2026 report documented a pattern of misrepresentation:

• Oshkosh, WI: Flock's CISO told the council the system did not "create a pattern or heat map." The council approved, discovered overnight that it was false, and revoked the contract in a single day. Flock's heat map shows a vehicle's captured locations for up to a month. The company called the lie "one small misconception."
• Loveland, CO: Flock said federal agencies no longer had access and the CEO said there were no federal contracts — then admitted CBP/DHS pilots. CEO: "We clearly communicated poorly."
• The ACLU partnership that never existed: Flock claimed it had "partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico" and "worked with groups like the ACLU." The ACLU says neither the national organisation nor any affiliate ever partnered with Flock.
• Cambridge, MA: After the city voted to remove cameras, it found Flock had installed two new ones without consent. The City Manager called it a "breach of trust."

10. The part nobody talks about: the private market

Focusing on Flock understates this considerably. Motorola Solutions owns both Vigilant Solutions (the law-enforcement network) and Digital Recognition Network (DRN) — a private database built largely by repo drivers with cameras on their trucks. DRN sells access to insurers, lenders, repossession firms, car dealers and private investigators. Reporting has put the price of a search at roughly $20. Vigilant's database has held billions of scans, with reports of ~100 million added daily. That data reached ICE through a Thomson Reuters CLEAR contract — meaning a sanctuary city could feed its residents to federal enforcement without ever signing anything, as researchers found in Union City, California.

And the federal layer predates all of it. The DEA has run a National License Plate Recognition Program since 2008. ACLU FOIA records showed 343 million records, queried through an interface called DEASIL, with cameras sited along what the DEA calls drug and money trafficking corridors — aggregating federal, state, local and tribal cameras. When the Washington Post reported in 2014 that DHS had cancelled its "national license-plate tracking plan," what had actually been cancelled was one ICE solicitation. The national programme already existed. It still does.

11. What the courts and legislatures did

Do ALPRs actually solve crimes?

A catalogue that only points one way isn't evidence. Here is the strongest honest case for ALPRs, and it is not weak.

They work. ALPRs demonstrably recover stolen vehicles, resolve AMBER Alerts and generate homicide leads that would otherwise go cold — Flock cites a week in Colorado where two AMBER Alerts and a homicide were solved. Under-resourced departments get investigative reach they could not otherwise afford. The overwhelming majority of searches are routine and legitimate, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise from a list of the exceptions. The audit logs do catch abuse — several cases above were found exactly that way, which is an argument for the system working as intended, not against it. And Flock has responded to pressure: ending federal partnerships, apologising in Dunwoody, agreeing to policy changes.

Where that argument runs out. "Mostly used well" is not the standard we apply to mass surveillance of people suspected of nothing — and 99.9% of the records concern exactly those people. The 24 stalking cases are not a failure of the technology; they are what happens when you place every resident's movement history in the hands of every officer with a login and check it with a free-text box. The 26 gunpoint stops are not bugs either — several were the system doing precisely what it was built to do. And the vendor statistics deserve the same scepticism as everything else: Flock's claims (700,000 crimes a year, 10% of US reported crime) come from its own Impact Census, not independent peer-reviewed study. DeFlock's Will Freeman notes the absence of independent confirmation.

Both things are true at once. The technology solves real crimes, and at this scale, with this oversight, abuse is not a risk but a certainty. A serious argument has to carry both — which is what 82 councils across 28 states appear to have concluded on the evidence.

How can I check if my plate was scanned?

July 2026: the accountability wave accelerates

The pattern this page documents did not slow down. In the span of a single month, more officers were fired, the company's credibility took further hits, and its CEO reversed a notorious insult — all verifiable in mainstream reporting.

The ACLU's credibility case

In April 2026 the ACLU published a detailed account arguing that Flock repeatedly misled city councils, police departments, and the public — and that "reputable governments" should avoid working with the company. The specifics are documented:

• Federal data sharing. Flock told a Colorado police chief (Loveland) and the press that federal agencies had no access and that federal data-sharing was a non-issue because Flock had no federal contracts. After contradictory information surfaced, the company admitted it did hold contracts with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security (DHS) for pilots giving those agencies direct access. "We clearly communicated poorly," the CEO said, conceding Flock's public statements "inadvertently provided inaccurate information."
• Immigration access. Even without federal contracts, cooperating police were regularly sharing Flock data and search results with ICE and CBP. Flock's CEO ultimately admitted the system was used for immigration enforcement but argued that wasn't Flock's problem.
• Heat maps. At an Oshkosh, Wisconsin council meeting, Flock's own security officer told the council its system didn't create vehicle heat maps revealing where a car had driven over time — a claim the ACLU disputes.

August 2026: a national investigation, and a new frontier

If July was a wave, August was the reckoning — a major newspaper investigation put a number on the pattern this page has tracked case by case, and a leaked pitch revealed where the network wants to go next.

Still moving through the courts. Many of the newest cases are pending rather than resolved, and the count keeps climbing — Newsweek tracked accusations across at least 12 states. Among those in active prosecution or open investigation as of mid-August 2026: Elizabeth Snowman (Mooresville, NC — prosecution pending; the audit flagged 11 officers), Christopher Goodson (Haines City, FL — 717 queries on his estranged wife), Brandon Sellers (Milledgeville, GA — fired and charged Aug 11), Emily Pacheco (New Bedford, MA — termination recommended Sept 3, alongside Sgt. James Marinelli), and Jaquarius Yarbrough (Richmond County, GA — 1,639 searches; five colleagues charged since), all listed in the table above. Departments are also finding it in clusters: the Savannah, GA police department terminated four officers and two civilian employees over Flock misuse, all six referred to the GBI — four were arrested on Aug 21, and one is accused of handing an outside agency unauthorised access, which is now under its own GBI investigation. Reynoldsburg, OH’s two officers resigned and were referred to Ohio BCI; probes remain open in Goodyear, AZ and Springville, AL. Two Wisconsin cases already in this file resolved this summer: Josue Ayala drew a year of probation after a judge rejected a lighter plea deal, and Cristian Morales was sentenced Aug 17 to three years of probation. The pattern is no longer isolated incidents — it is a steady docket.

The rideshare pitch: 350,000 cars as mobile cameras

The most consequential August development wasn’t an arrest — it was a plan. A Flock presentation prepared for the Georgia Attorney General’s office, obtained through a public-records request by Dunwoody resident Jason Hunyar and reported by 404 Media, revealed that Flock pitched turning roughly 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery vehicles into mobile license plate readers. The mechanism: a partnership with dashcam maker Nexar, whose cameras are already mounted in hundreds of thousands of gig-driver windshields. Every time a driver stopped at a light or dropped off an order, the dashcam would passively log the plate, make, model, and color of surrounding vehicles — feeding Flock’s network. The deck’s own words: “350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service devices.”

Flock told 404 Media the Nexar partnership was never executed — and that qualifier matters, so we state it plainly. But three things make this more than a shelved idea. First, intent and scale: the company put the plan in writing and pitched it to a state attorney general, so it was far enough along to sell to law enforcement as a product. Second, the consent gap: nothing in the reporting indicates Uber, Lyft, or the drivers themselves would have known their vehicles were feeding a police-accessible network — a rider or driver who bought a Nexar cam as a crash witness would have become an unwitting surveillance node. Third, a national-security dimension: in September 2025 a hacker breached Nexar and accessed terabytes of customer video, including footage near U.S. Department of Defense sites — a distributed fleet of always-recording cameras is exactly the collection surface a foreign service, or any breach, would find valuable.

It also fits a documented Flock pattern: push a boundary, retreat under criticism, keep the blueprint. The company previously built and then abandoned a tool to link plates to individuals using leaked data, and a similar mobile-camera arrangement with the school-bus firm BusPatrol has already been deployed. The rideshare pitch belongs in the same lineage as device-signature tracking: the network keeps looking for new surfaces to grow onto, and the debate is always after the capability is built, never before.

Late August–September 2026: the audits start finding them

Flock’s CEO predicted a “dramatic increase” in officer arrests once its audit tooling became mandatory. Within three weeks it had arrived. Between 12 August and 6 September, at least 35 officers and employees in 12 states were fired, arrested, indicted or resigned over ALPR misuse — more than the whole of 2025 — and the detection pattern flipped: most of these were found by the agencies’ own audits rather than by a victim.

Georgia: the GBI docket

Georgia alone produced more than a dozen. In Richmond County the arrest of Deputy Jaquarius Yarbrough in June became six sworn personnel charged at one sheriff’s office after Investigator Sean Morrow and Deputy Jose Ferrer were fired and arrested on Sept 2. Hall County lost seven deputies in ten days — three investigators fired, four resigned — after an audit sweep. The GBI also arrested a former Covington detective who ran an ex-girlfriend’s plate roughly 2,890 times, a former Paulding County 911 director, a Clayton County deputy, a Hahira officer, Habersham County’s second deputy in a month, Cherokee County’s fourth, and — a first — a Department of Corrections special agent, the first non-police state employee charged. DeKalb County suspended eight officers after biweekly audits of 53,276 searches; Savannah’s six referrals became four arrests, with one employee accused of giving an outside agency unauthorised access.

Everywhere else

The largest single case is Lufkin, Texas, where an 11-year officer was indicted on 100 felony counts of misuse of official information for searching eleven people over eighteen months; the department suspended Flock use. A Jackson County, Indiana deputy searched one plate 2,055 times, logging every query as “City Planning/Traffic Analysis”. Colleton County, South Carolina fired two lieutenants in eleven days — one had run 2,700 unauthorised searches in a year, including on himself and fellow deputies — and revoked individual deputy access entirely. A Jefferson Parish deputy who admitted 3,200 searches of his ex-fiancée was fired but not charged because she declined to pursue it; a Brentwood, Missouri officer who tracked his ex-wife during their divorce faced no charge at all because prosecutors found no applicable crime under Missouri law — a gap several states share. Stow, Massachusetts did what few have: when an officer resigned ahead of a termination hearing, the town cancelled Flock and pulled its cameras. In Henrico County, Virginia, ten fire marshals were found to hold Flock access in violation of the state’s 2025 law; it was revoked Aug 18 and Flock evidence in five arson cases is now inadmissible.

What the records requests turned up

The month’s most consequential findings came from residents filing public-records requests, not from oversight bodies. In Pflugerville, Texas, a resident’s request showed more than 450 agencies had access to the city’s cameras against 80 approved, and roughly 1.6 million outside searches in six months; the council declined renewal unanimously. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the mayor disclosed that a Flock sales representative had emailed the city’s engineering department offering to sell it five years of speed and vehicle-movement data captured by the city’s own 15 cameras — data the city says it never agreed to collect. That offer sits awkwardly beside Flock’s retention promise: the 30-day (now 7-day) deletion applies to raw plate reads, while Flock’s standard terms classify derived analytics as “Flock Property” that the company retains and can market for years. It does not show plate images were kept; it does show that where your car was and how fast it was going persists long after the plate read is gone. The police chief said it “undermines his trust in the system”; the council votes Sept 8. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, police refused to name the federal recipients of Flock data at a commission hearing; a 2025 search logged as “deportation warrant” was attributed to an ATF user. In Washington State, one resident’s 53 Flock records requests have produced more than $300,000 in settlements from 15 jurisdictions that failed to respond lawfully. And Millcreek, Utah found and removed a Flock camera on city property that neither it nor its police had authorised; the installer is unknown.

Contracts ended, funding pulled

Beyond Pflugerville and Stow: Hopkinton, MA terminated on the grounds the contract was unlawful under Massachusetts law; Asheville, NC voted 5–2, Christiansburg, VA 6–0, Fort Wayne, IN unanimously; St. Charles County, MO bagged all 28 cameras after a civilian employee’s searches were flagged. Most significantly, on Aug 28 Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered every state agency to stop funding Flock — state agencies had spent at least $30 million and DPS was mid-way through installing roughly 1,200 cameras under a $15.9 million contract; Dallas is deactivating 321 state-funded units. A Wisconsin wave followed Sheboygan’s disclosure: Fond du Lac County shut its cameras off immediately, and Wausau, Marathon County and Kenosha put theirs under review.

Oversight, litigation and the reporting

On Aug 26, Senator Josh Hawley, chairing the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, opened an investigation into Flock with documents due Sept 8, citing among other things a Florida woman jailed 13 days on a Flock error and the LAPD’s 161 false stolen-vehicle flags; on Sept 3 he extended it to Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada. A bipartisan “Flock-Off Act” to bar federal funding for ALPRs outside borders and tolling was introduced the same week. On Aug 25 a Dahlonega resident filed a federal class action against Flock in the Northern District of Georgia — the third such suit after California and Virginia. And 404 Media added five documents to the record in as many weeks: seven state fusion centers monitoring anti-Flock social-media accounts; the National Park Service running Flock at Yosemite and Golden Gate over rangers’ objections; Flock’s CEO telling police the Johnson County abortion-search story was “entirely false” (404 Media’s rebuttal); the sheriff’s report on that search turning out to have been drafted with Axon’s Draft One AI; and a Flock webinar teaching police to use FlockOS to monitor the No Kings protests. A Wisconsin criminal complaint also showed deputies using Flock to track a man’s trips to Michigan as pretext for a marijuana stop.

The one wrongful stop added this period: on Aug 6, Brookfield, Wisconsin officers stopped two women at gunpoint on I-94 after Milwaukee police failed to clear a homicide hot-list entry. Both were released without charge.

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