Sac Sheriff: Witnesses and technology help deputies track shooting suspect

Our Take

ABC10's report, credited to its newsroom covering Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper's press briefing, describes a horrific case: a woman killed in a parking lot, and the man accused of shooting her found dead by apparent suicide on Highway 50 less than an hour later. A Flock ALPR hit on a partial plate description helped deputies locate the vehicle seven minutes after the 911 call. It's the kind of anecdote Flock and its law enforcement partners love to hand reporters — fast, dramatic, and framed as proof the network works.

But look closer and the "success" is thinner than the headline suggests. The suspect was already dead when deputies arrived. The ALPR hit didn't stop a killing, prevent a second victim, or lead to an arrest — it located a body. That's a legitimate investigative tool doing exactly what it was built for: tracking vehicle movement after the fact. The problem is these stories get repeated by sheriffs nationwide to justify expanding camera networks, with almost no public accounting of how many hits lead nowhere, how long the data sits in a database, or who else gets to query it beyond the case at hand.

Every one of these press conferences is a pitch for more cameras, more funding, and less scrutiny — not because the technology caught anyone in the act, but because it generated a data point after tragedy already happened. If you want to know how many of these systems are already watching your own commute, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not add more without a public debate, see what you can do.