Florida Bad Cop 358 Searches One License Plate Then They Fired Him

Our Take

Credit to OhDangReally for digging into this one: a USA Today reporter was combing through public Flock audit logs — the same kind of logs departments love to point to as 'accountability' — and found a Sarasota officer, Cory Waiters, had searched a single license plate 358 times over five months with no case file to justify it. That's not a glitch. That's a person using a mass-surveillance network as a personal tool, and it only came to light because someone outside the department bothered to read the paperwork.

The speed of the fallout — internal affairs, paid leave, a department-wide audit, then an arrest and firing within days — tells you two things. First, agencies know exactly how bad this looks when it's public, which is why they move fast once a reporter is watching. Second, nobody inside the system flagged it first. Audit logs exist, but logs only matter if someone is actually auditing them, and that's not the default. Most departments aren't getting a USA Today review. The 100 people who showed up to protest the same camera network in St. Petersburg that same week clearly understand that the Waiters case isn't an outlier story, it's a preview of what unsupervised access looks like at scale.

This is exactly the gap we track: thousands of these cameras running nationwide with audit trails nobody reads until a scandal forces the issue. Check our camera map to see what's logging plates near you, and if your city is debating a Flock contract, use our take-action resources before the vote, not after the arrest.