Cops Keep Using License Plate Cameras to Stalk Women. One Gets His Charges Erased.

Our Take

Credit to Linsay Rousseau at The Rogue Voice for digging into this one, because it's exactly the kind of story that gets buried in a local docket and never makes the evening news. A Monroe County deputy allegedly used his access to license plate reader data to track a woman he'd met on a film set — and then, when it came time for consequences, the charges against him got erased. That's not a bug in the system. That's the system working as designed for the people who run it.

Flock Safety and its law enforcement partners love to sell these networks as tools to catch violent criminals and recover stolen cars. What they don't advertise is how trivially easy it is for any badge-holder with a login to turn a surveillance dragnet into a personal stalking tool. There's no meaningful audit trail that the public can see, no independent review before a cop runs a plate for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety, and when misuse does surface, departments routinely slow-walk discipline or let it disappear into a plea deal. Women have been stalked, harassed, and intimidated by men with institutional power and keys to a database that was never supposed to exist for this purpose.

This is the actual argument against mass ALPR deployment: it's not hypothetical abuse, it's recurring abuse, and the accountability mechanisms are built to protect the officer, not the public. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has the tools to start.