🔍 Every Documented Misuse of ALPR and Flock Cameras

The scale

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. Officers using ALPRs to stalk

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. The children's gym class: Dunwoody, Georgia

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. Innocent people 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. Immigration enforcement against sanctuary policy

• 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. Security failures

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

The counter-case, made properly

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.

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