When officers misuse the system

Every case on this page was discovered. That is the reason to read it carefully. Police officers have used license plate reader networks to track ex-wives, girlfriends, coworkers and people they were interested in — hundreds of searches on a single person in some cases. Those cases surfaced because a victim complained, a records request landed, or somebody ran an audit. Nothing in this technology causes misuse to surface on its own, and Deer Park has never published an audit.

The documented count, and why it is a floor

The Institute for Justice maintains a running review of press reports and public records on officers using ALPR systems to track people they were personally involved with. As of July 2026 it lists at least 28 incidents, most of them since 2024, with the earliest dated September 2021.¹

We counted the vendor field on each of the 28 entries: Flock Safety is the named system in 23, one names a competitor, and four are unspecified.¹ This is not a Flock-specific defect — it is what happens when any searchable movement database is placed on a lot of desks — but Flock is the system Deer Park bought.

IJ states the limit of its own count plainly:

The 28 cases listed below are almost certainly an undercount. Institute for Justice, updated July 25, 2026¹

Two reasons are given, and both matter more than the number does. Not all misconduct is detected. And officers who intend to misuse the system can enter a vague reason for the search, which is what makes detection hard.¹

Flock does not dispute that this is the pattern. Its own chief legal officer, Dan Haley, told The Bulwark that when misuse happens it is rarely elaborate — an officer using the system "to figure out where an ex-girlfriend is," he said, is "actually the most common thing."²

That is the vendor's own senior lawyer describing partner-tracking as the most common form of misuse of the product he sells. Deer Park's council should take it as settled, because the company has conceded it: this is the predictable failure mode of the system, not a freak event. The question is not whether it can happen in Deer Park. It is whether anyone in Deer Park would ever find out.

Flock's answer to that is its audit tooling, and the answer deserves a fair hearing. Co-founder Paige Todd told FOX 5 Atlanta that a wave of Georgia arrests came in part from a new Flock audit tool that automatically flags unusual searches, and that "the technology itself was not creating the misuse. It was human beings."² The first half of that is a real point in the company's favor, and we make it ourselves below. The second half is where the argument breaks down for Deer Park: a tool that flags unusual searches only protects a department that reads the flags, and Deer Park has published no audit of any kind.³

What the individual cases look like

These are drawn from IJ's list. We name officers only where charges or termination are a matter of public record in the underlying reporting, and we describe outcomes rather than allegations wherever the two differ.¹

The pattern that recurs is volume — not one lookup in a moment of bad judgment, but sustained tracking:

• Richmond County, Georgia, June 2025. A former deputy was arrested after allegedly running a woman's plate 1,639 times over several months.¹
• Sedgwick, Kansas, October 2023. A police chief resigned after tracking his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend more than 200 times.¹
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 2025. An officer allegedly tracked a woman he had dated, and her ex, nearly 180 times over a two-month period. He resigned in 2026 after being charged. The department subsequently revoked most officers' access to the Flock database.¹
• Jerome County, Idaho, July 2025. A sheriff searched for his wife's vehicle hundreds of times. The state attorney general found no crime; he retired early in April 2026.¹
• Orange City, Florida, June 2024. An officer allegedly tracked his girlfriend and her relatives more than 100 times across seven months.¹
• Shelby County, Tennessee, August 2024. A deputy was relieved of duty after allegedly tracking his ex-wife more than 100 times.¹

Several cases involve people inside the department rather than outside it. A Pasadena, Texas sergeant resigned amid an investigation into using the cameras to track a female officer.¹ A Greer, South Carolina corporal was fired after an internal audit found searches on a subordinate he had previously dated.¹ A Conyers, Georgia real-time crime center supervisor — someone whose job was operating the system — was fired and charged over tracking a domestic partner.¹

And outcomes vary in a way worth noticing. IJ reports that nearly all of the 28 officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs.¹ But a Fort Bend County, Texas lieutenant who tracked several people dozens of times received a two-day suspension, and a Kenosha County, Wisconsin deputy who tracked a coworker resigned with severance.¹

The searches nobody can evaluate: what the reason field is worth

Flock requires an officer to give a reason for each search. Understanding what that requirement actually delivers is the difference between an audit and a formality.

Senator Ron Wyden's October 2025 letter to Flock's CEO, based on his office's own inquiry, states that Flock does not require a case-specific reason and does not prohibit generic entries:

Flock has confirmed to my office that it does not require its law enforcement users to enter a case-specific reason, nor does Flock prohibit law enforcement customers from entering meaningless, generic reasons such as "investigation" or "crime." Sen. Ron Wyden, letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, October 16, 2025⁵

The same letter reports what that produces at scale. From a dataset the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained by public records request and provided to Wyden's office — 11.4 million Flock searches nationwide over six months — more than 14 percent of the stated reasons were the single word "investigation," with no case number.⁵

That is roughly 1.6 million searches of people's movement histories for which the recorded justification is one word.

Wyden's letter also reports a control gap that applies directly to a nine-camera city: a Flock customer can set stricter reason requirements for its own employees, but cannot control the reasons given for searches of its data by other agencies.⁵ And it reports that 75 percent of Flock's law enforcement customers had enrolled in the National Lookup Tool, which lets any other enrolled agency search their data.⁵ Whether Deer Park is among them has never been stated publicly.³

There is a further detail in the letter that says something about how the company responds to scrutiny. Flock had offered customers an opt-in case-number setting under which, Wyden writes, "employees of those agencies would not be required to document any reason at all when submitting searches of other agencies' data" — a setting that turned an accountability feature into a way of searching a neighbor's cameras with no recorded justification. Flock removed the option on August 18, 2025, and confirmed it to Wyden's office on August 19, "shortly after receiving questions about it from my office."⁵

The fix is real. The timing is the point: the setting existed until a Senate office asked about it, and its removal was disclosed the next day.

The letter's characterization of Flock's own posture is a quotation from the company's chief communications officer:

it is not Flock's job to police the police. Flock's chief communications officer, as quoted by Sen. Wyden, October 16, 2025⁵

Set that against what Flock's CEO says about the same subject. His June 2025 statement calls audit logging part of "our commitment to transparency and accountability from the beginning of the design process," notes that auditing "is not a legal requirement for Flock in most jurisdictions," and says agencies "should regularly conduct audits."⁶ Both positions are the company's: the logging is a designed-in commitment, and reading the logs belongs to somebody else. Wyden's term for that combination is "a see-no-evil approach of not proactively auditing the searches done by its law enforcement customers."⁵

The arrangement works only if the customer is doing the auditing. Deer Park has published none.³

Wyden's conclusion — his words, and he is a party with a position — is that "abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable," that "Flock has built a dangerous platform in which abuse of surveillance data is almost certain," and that "local elected officials can best protect their constituents from the inevitable abuses of Flock cameras by removing Flock from their communities."⁵

Ohio's own example of what an audit finds

Columbus provides the in-state demonstration, and it is recent.

In July 2026, at the request of City Council member Emmanuel Remy, Columbus released an audit of Flock searches touching its cameras. The police division's analysis said its network "was searched for possible immigration related reasons up to 15,577 times" — out of 19.6 million total searches of the Columbus system since November 2023.^8,9 Mayor Andrew Ginther ordered the police division to stop statewide sharing of its Flock cameras, saying: "Our data will not be used for the possible purpose of immigration enforcement, by anyone."⁸

We want to state the department's side accurately, because it is a real counterargument. The city said the flagged searches were less than 1 percent of the total, and its summary called immigration-purpose searching "relatively infrequent" and locally "nearly nonexistent."⁹ The audit found ICE itself ran no searches of Columbus data, and that Columbus police searched their own data for immigration-related reasons 20 times — of which Deputy Chief Tim Myers said one user's six searches with the stated reason "ICE" concerned him.⁹ Myers credited the cameras with aiding about 60 percent of last year's homicide investigations, and said on removal: "The community will get exactly what it asks for. Part of my job though is to make it very clear that we will solve fewer crimes. That is demonstrable and beyond dispute."⁹

What this means for Deer Park specifically

We want to be exact about this section, because it would be easy to misread it as an accusation.

We have no evidence that anyone in the Deer Park Police Department has misused this system, and we are not suggesting it. If we had such evidence we would publish it, and if the department produces an audit showing clean use we will publish that too and link it from this page.

The argument is about what is knowable. Three facts, each sourced elsewhere on this site:

1. No audit has been published. We checked the police department pages, the contacts page, the records policy, and the auditor's reports on July 29, 2026.³
2. No written policy has been published, so there is no public rule stating what a permissible search is, who reviews search logs, or how often.³
3. Deer Park's cameras are already visible outside Deer Park. The count of nine comes from a Flock shared-devices list released by a different agency under a records request.¹¹

Put those together and the position is not that misuse has occurred. It is that if it had, no mechanism exists by which a Deer Park resident or council member would find out. Every case on this page was found by a mechanism Deer Park does not have.

That is also why the ask on this page is modest and specific. Even a council that intends to renew can require a published search-audit report, and requiring one costs nothing.