Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers are now installed in thousands of U.S. towns, marketed to police departments, homeowners associations, and school districts as a low-cost way to solve crimes and find missing people. But the same feature that makes the system powerful — a searchable, cross-jurisdictional record of where a car has been — has also made it a repeated target of abuse by the people who have access to it. Below is a record of individually reported incidents, organized by category, with sources for each. Because most of this misuse has surfaced only after victims noticed it themselves rather than through routine oversight, researchers who track these cases describe their counts as floors, not ceilings.
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Officers using the system to track romantic partners, exes, or people they were interested in
This is the largest and best-documented category. The Institute for Justice (IJ), a legal nonprofit that litigates against warrantless surveillance, has maintained a running tally that stood at 24 cases as of mid-July 2026, with the majority occurring since 2024.
- Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (2021): Officer Michael McSherry pleaded guilty to stalking charges for using license plate readers to track his estranged wife and other family members. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Kechi, Kansas (2023): Lieutenant Victor Heiar pleaded guilty to computer crime and stalking for using Flock cameras to track his estranged wife. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Sedgwick, Kansas (2023): Police Chief Lee Nygaard resigned after running his ex-girlfriend’s plate and her new boyfriend’s plate more than 200 times. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Costa Mesa, California (2023): Officer Robert Josett used the department’s Flock system to track a mistress and her other romantic interests; he pleaded guilty to multiple charges in April 2026. (Source: Institute for Justice; CBS Los Angeles)
- Riverside County, California (2024): Deputy Alexander Vanny, already facing a kidnapping charge involving his ex-fiancée, allegedly used Flock to track one of her friends; convicted on multiple charges in December 2025. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Orange City, Florida (2024–25): Officer Jarmarus Brown ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate at least 69 times over roughly seven months, and also searched for her mother’s plate at least 24 times and her father’s at least 15 times. A fellow officer told investigators he’d warned Brown he “could get in trouble” for it. Brown was arrested and charged in 2025. (Source: 404 Media, citing court records)
- Shelby County, Tennessee (2024): Deputy Thadius Gordon was relieved of duty after allegedly using the ALPR database to locate his ex-wife more than 100 times. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Matteson, Illinois (2024): Officer Jaila Cole-Clark allegedly ran hundreds of searches on a former domestic partner and that person’s new partner; she resigned mid-investigation. (Source: Institute for Justice, citing stopflock.org)
- Louisville, Kentucky (2025): Officer Roberto Cedeno was charged with multiple felonies for allegedly tracking an ex-partner and her friends hundreds of times over two months. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2025–26): Officer Josue Ayala allegedly searched the plate of a woman he was dating, and her ex, nearly 180 times over two months. The case only came to light after the victims checked the public audit-log site HaveIBeenFlocked.com. Ayala resigned, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, and in July 2026 was sentenced to one year of probation and a $500 fine; his victims subsequently sought a restraining order against him. (Sources: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; WISN; Institute for Justice)
- Jerome County, Idaho (2025): Sheriff George Oppedyk used the Flock system to search for his wife’s vehicle hundreds of times; Idaho’s Attorney General found no crime, but Oppedyk retired early in April 2026. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Kenosha County, Wisconsin (2025): Deputy Frank McGrath resigned, with severance pay, after an internal probe found he used Flock to monitor a coworker he was romantically involved with. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Menasha, Wisconsin (2025): Officer Cristian Morales was placed on leave and charged with misconduct in office after his ex-girlfriend complained he had tracked her through Flock. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Braselton, Georgia (2025): Police Chief Michael Steffman was arrested for allegedly using license plate readers to stalk multiple people, including a former partner; he resigned shortly beforehand. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Bonner Springs, Kansas (2025–26): Detective Kyle Rector allegedly tracked his estranged wife and two men he suspected were her new partners; charged with multiple crimes in March 2026. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Monroe County, Florida (2026): Deputy Lamar Roman allegedly used Flock to track, and eventually pull over, a woman he had met while providing security on a TV set. Arrested on charges of unauthorized computer access. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Coffee County, Georgia (2026): Former Deputy Chris Rozar was charged after allegedly using the department’s Flock system to stalk a woman he was interested in; he was fired at the start of the investigation. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Niceville, Florida (2026): Former Officer Coty Hall pleaded no contest after using Flock to track another officer and that officer’s spouse; caught via internal audit, fired following arrest in October 2025. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Winnebago County, Illinois (2026): Former Deputy Tyler Bryan was charged with stalking and official misconduct for allegedly monitoring an ex-girlfriend and her new partner; surfaced after the victims sought a protective order. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Prairie Grove, Illinois (2026): Officer William Copp, who also served as police chief of nearby Holiday Hills, was arrested for searching Flock for several former partners and at least one of their new partners. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Gwinnett County, Georgia (2026): Officer Renee Downer was arrested and relieved of duty for allegedly using law enforcement databases, including Flock, to monitor an ex-partner. (Source: Institute for Justice)
- Pasadena, Texas (2026): Sergeant Michael Palitz resigned while under investigation; city officials told KPRC 2 he had used the cameras to track and stalk a female officer. (Sources: KPRC 2/Click2Houston; Police1; Institute for Justice)
- Greer, South Carolina (2026): Corporal Kareem Lynch was fired after an internal audit found he used Flock to monitor the whereabouts of a subordinate he’d previously been involved with; Officer Sebastian Echeverry was fired in the same audit, with at least one search reportedly targeting an ex-girlfriend. (Sources: WLOS; Institute for Justice, citing FITSNews)
Georgia’s 2026 “personal use” enforcement wave (not romantically motivated)
A separate, faster-moving cluster surfaced in Georgia in June and July 2026, where officers were caught looking up their own plates or those of relatives and acquaintances rather than pursuing anyone specific.
- Cherokee County (June 2026): Three sheriff’s office employees, including deputies Chris Bryant and Mike Creeden, were fired and arrested on felony violation-of-oath charges after misusing the county’s Flock system; two more supervisors, a sergeant and a lieutenant, were arrested days later in the same investigation. (Sources: Atlanta News First; 11Alive; WSB-TV)
- Albany (July 6–7, 2026): Five former Albany Police Department officers — Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Nicholas Richardson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus — were arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation after an internal audit found they’d accessed retained Flock data for non-law-enforcement purposes. All five were terminated. (Source: FOX 5 Atlanta)
- Greene County (July 8, 2026): Deputy Quinsha Goss was fired and arrested after an audit found she’d accessed the county’s Flock system for personal reasons multiple times over a three-month period. (Sources: WJCL; FOX 5 Atlanta)
- Fayetteville (reported July 17, 2026): The Fayetteville Police Department fired three officers after an internal audit tool flagged that they’d searched license plates belonging to themselves, family members, or acquaintances, “without a legitimate law-enforcement purpose,” in the department’s words. None of the searches involved a stalking target; the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is running an independent criminal review. The Auto Wire, covering the story the same day, noted this made it the second Georgia department in ten days to catch this kind of “curiosity” misuse through a department-wide audit rather than a victim complaint. (Sources: WSB-TV; The Auto Wire)
Flock’s senior public affairs director, Trevor Chandler, addressed the pattern directly to WSB-TV, saying, “Any misuse of the Flock system is unacceptable, period.”
Unauthorized access by federal agencies
- ICE “side-door” access (revealed May 2025): A 404 Media investigation, based on records from the Danville, Illinois Police Department, found more than 4,000 nationwide Flock lookups logged by local and state police with reasons like “immigration,” “ICE,” or “ICE WARRANT” — effectively giving ICE informal access to a system it has no direct contract with, despite state laws in Illinois, California, and Virginia barring ALPR data from being used for immigration enforcement. (Source: 404 Media)
- Abortion-related tracking (revealed June 2025): In the same reporting window, 404 Media found a Texas officer had used Flock’s nationwide lookup tool to search for a woman who had self-administered an abortion. The disclosure prompted an Illinois Secretary of State investigation and led Flock to remove Illinois, California, and Virginia from its national lookup network. (Source: 404 Media)
- Broader federal access (October 2025): Later 404 Media reporting found that ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. Navy had all obtained some form of access into Flock’s nationwide camera network. (Source: 404 Media)
Data exposure incidents
- Search-log leak via public search engines (June 2026): 404 Media and Colorado’s NoCo Privacy Coalition found that Flock had inadvertently allowed officers’ logged search “reasons,” and in some cases the specific plates searched, to be indexed and surfaced by DuckDuckGo and Bing — exposing internal audit data that was never meant to be public. (Source: 404 Media)
The pattern across cases
Taken together, these incidents point to the same structural gap repeatedly: audit trails exist, but they only catch misuse when an agency actively reviews them, and most of these cases became public only after a victim went looking on their own — often via the public log-checking tool HaveIBeenFlocked.com. That pattern, combined with the volume of new cases surfacing weekly through mid-2026, has driven dozens of cities to cancel their Flock contracts and prompted at least one congressional inquiry into the company’s practices.
A note on scope: this list reflects incidents that have been reported by name in news coverage, court filings, or tracked by organizations like the Institute for Justice as of July 17, 2026. Given the pace of new disclosures, it is very likely incomplete.