In Reply to: It’s Friday! Time to go make stories for Monday. * posted by mh on August 28, 2026 at 09:22:11
At least 19 police and sheriff’s office employees in five states were arrested, fired, put on administrative leave or placed under investigation over the last two months for using Flock Safety's vast network of license plate reader cameras to track cars’ locations for potentially improper or illegal purposes.
But it wasn't their police supervisors who spotted their irregular search activity. It was USA TODAY reporters.
In Dallas, Georgia, state investigators arrested a 911 director who searched more than 2,500 times for cars belonging to her estranged husband and his new girlfriend.
In Sarasota, Florida, an officer who tracked an ex-girlfriend’s car at least 335 times over two months was fired and arrested.
The Lufkin Police Department in Texas suspended all Flock use after Rangers arrested an officer who had repeatedly tracked seven license plates, one more than 3,400 times. He is charged with at least 100 felonies.
In each of those cases and more than a dozen others, USA TODAY flagged their patterns of questionable searches before their own agencies did. Only after reporters contacted their employers did the agencies spring into action.
Their cases illustrate a dynamic that is playing out in communities across the country. As Flock and other brands of automated license plate readers become ubiquitous in nearly every state, many law enforcement agencies have done little to monitor how their own employees use them.
Some of that work instead has fallen on journalists, activists and others concerned that anyone with access to the company’s private camera networks can follow virtually any driver's movements with a query as effortless as a Google search.