Police Chiefs Caught Stalking Exes via Flock LPR Fuel Push for Warrant Rules

License plate reader vendor Flock insists its cameras track vehicles, not people, but a growing record of police officials using the system to follow romantic partners undercuts that claim. The latest case: an Illinois police chief was arrested in June 2026 and charged with felony official misconduct for allegedly running Flock and state database queries on six people he knew personally over an 18-month span. Three were former romantic partners; he ran one woman’s ex-boyfriend’s plate well over a hundred times, many of those searches while off duty, and left the man a threatening voicemail. The Institute for Justice counts at least 18 similar abuse cases nationwide and calls that an undercount, with parallel incidents in Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Wisconsin, and California spanning ranks from patrol officer to chief.

The pattern exposes a contradiction at the heart of Flock’s messaging. The company publicly denies that it tracks individuals, yet its own chief legal officer admitted on air that using the system to locate an ex is “actually the most common” form of abuse, while simultaneously framing it as rare. When a chief runs a rival’s plate 140 times, the vehicle is just the mechanism; the person is the target. The fact that the abusers include senior, highly trained officials who write and enforce the usage rules suggests internal training and discipline are inadequate safeguards against a tool that offers real-time location data with no prior authorization.

Civil liberties groups including the ACLU, EFF, and IJ don’t want LPR banned—they want it gated behind warrants, the same standard courts already apply to GPS trackers (Jones), historical cell location (Carpenter), and wiretaps. Flock argues warrant requirements would cost lives, but the existing exigent-circumstances exception already covers genuine emergencies; the proposed warrant rule would apply only to routine, passive searches of stored data, the exact category every stalking case falls into. Even Flock’s own legal chief has conceded that as the technology grows more ubiquitous and powerful, a warrant requirement is coming.