Last December, Milwaukee Police Department internal affairs detectives began investigating an officer accused of misusing Flock, the department’s automated license-plate reader system.
The detectives investigating officer Josue Ayala found he secretly used Flock to learn the location of his romantic partner 124 times and that partner’s ex 55 times, according to a February criminal complaint.
Ayala agreed to resign from the department and plead guilty to attempted misconduct in public office as part of a deal, according to court records.
Then earlier this month, one of the detectives who had investigated Ayala was himself arrested for misusing the Flock system. The detective, Tehrangi Chapman, admitted to using Flock to track two people and to secretly installing a GPS device on one person’s vehicle, according to a criminal complaint.
The incidents are among at least two dozen cases in which officers resigned or were arrested for allegedly abusing Flock’s automated license-plate reader system to stalk romantic interests, according to a tally from the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm.
Just in the past month, five Albany police officers in Georgia were arrested and fired for allegedly misusing Flock, and police in Greer, South Carolina, fired two officers for misusing the product.
The cases underscore the growing use – and misuse – of automated license-plate reader systems, known as ALPRs, that police departments across the country have adopted in recent years.
The technology has its proponents who laud its investigative power, while opponents call it a mass surveillance system that violates privacy and civil liberties.
All agree that police abuse of the ALPR system, such as in Milwaukee, rattles the public’s trust.
“This case represents an abuse of power and a misuse of power. It results in a lack of trust from our community,” Milwaukee County deputy district attorney Matthew Torbenson said at Ayala’s sentencing hearing Wednesday. “That’s the story that is going to end and be printed today is about police misuse of the Flock system, when the truth of the matter is the vast majority of law enforcement appropriately uses that tool to investigate crime.”
In response to these concerns, Flock has taken steps to crack down on police abuse of its technology. Flock CEO and co-founder Garrett Langley told CNN in an interview the company last month launched an “audit assistance tool” that alerts an auditor to “abnormal” uses of its system.
“This is such a powerful tool, we don’t want to reduce the efficacy of the 99.99% of officers who go to work every single day and want to do good for their community,” Langley said.
ALPRs are cameras – either mounted on vehicles or on fixed poles along public roads – that take images of a vehicle’s plates and other identifying characteristics and store that information in a database.
The system alerts police when a vehicle on a “hotlist,” such as one associated with a crime or a missing person, drives by a camera. Police can also search for a specific license plate number to see the vehicle’s recent movements. In addition, departments can share their information with neighboring agencies to better coordinate a response.
Flock Safety, based in Atlanta, is the largest such ALPR company and works with over 5,000 law enforcement agencies. The company says its network includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states.
Founded in 2017, Flock announced last March it was valued at $7.5 billion after its latest $275 million funding round from major Silicon Valley investors, who include Andreessen Horowitz and the Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund.
Law enforcement officials have said the technology is helpful in solving crimes, particularly stolen vehicle cases. Notably, police used Flock cameras last year to track down the suspect in the mass shooting at Brown University.
The Milwaukee Police Department sent CNN a summary of 24 cases that used ALPRs in April and another 26 cases in May. In one instance, ALPRs helped police catch a suspect accused of domestic violence, vehicle robbery and possession of a firearm. In another, the ALPR system helped officers locate and arrest a suspect with a warrant for strangulation.
“These results are only a small sampling of the impact this tool has, but illustrate the effectiveness of this technology as it relates to some of the most serious crimes that occur within our community,” Milwaukee police said in a statement.
Still, only a few studies have looked at the technology’s overall effectiveness. One recent study looked at the Atlantic City, New Jersey, police department’s use of ALPRs from 2022 to 2024 and found mixed results that were hard to separate from the nationwide decline in crime over that same period.
“While the ALPR expansion did not reduce violent crime, it was associated with reductions in shootings, motor vehicle thefts, and property crime,” the study said.
Flock says it supported about 1 million law enforcement investigations last year and helped locate more than 10,000 missing persons. Langley believes Flock was a “big part” of the nationwide decline in crime the last few years, he told CNN.
“When I talk to my customers, when I travel around the country, there is a long list of success stories that would have been cold cases if not for Flock,” he said. “Time and time again, I’m hearing from my customers, ‘Crime is going down because of Flock. We are solving crime because of Flock.’”
Thaddeus Johnson, a former law enforcement official and now senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice think tank, told CNN that Flock’s ALPRs are great at generating leads but don’t solve everything.
“That really depends on the quality of your investigators, on your policies, your guardrails, the quality of your camera systems, how you maintain it, and those things like that,” he said. “So they can improve certain investigations, but it’s not that installing cameras automatically makes a community safer.”
The technology has faced increasing backlash from those concerned about the creation of a camera system watching every vehicle’s movement. Some opponents have even taken the matter into their own hands and vandalized Flock’s cameras to take them out of commission.
ACLU senior policy counsel Chad Marlow said the technology is “creepy” and has spurred a broad opposition across the political spectrum.
“Everybody arrives at the same point, which is this is out of control. It has to be reined in,” he said.
The ACLU’s concerns stem from three key points related to the lack of guardrails on the system.
First, ALPRs can be used to find any vehicle that has passed by a camera and is not limited to cases involving serious felonies or missing children, and there is no requirement to get a warrant. Second, data-sharing between local police departments – or with the Department of Homeland Security – can lead to the creation of a nationwide surveillance system that tracks vehicles around the country.
Finally, Flock’s vehicle data is stored for a default of 30 days before deletion. Marlow said that was a significant period of time.
“The longer you retain the data, the more troubling it becomes because it can reveal patterns of life,” Marlow said. “You can start to figure out what doctor’s offices a person goes to, what religious institutions, what political meetings, even where they sleep at night, just by tracking the patterns of their life.”
The arrests in Milwaukee reveal what can happen without these legal guardrails, critics say.
Officers using Flock had to write a brief explanation of the reason for conducting a search, but these explanations were vague. In Ayala’s case, he gave the reason for the search as “investigation,” according to the criminal complaint. Chapman listed the reason for his improper Flock searches as “training” and “test,” according to his complaint.
Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, the law firm that has filed lawsuits against Flock on Fourth Amendment grounds, said the underlying problem is police can use the system without a warrant or clear reason.
“As a consequence of the lack of those, you have police using all this data for personal reasons and for the wrong reasons. … Every officer basically gets to decide when to log in and search this database,” Soyfer said. “The instances of abuse that we’ve uncovered are really just the tip of the iceberg.”
Langley, the Flock CEO, said different communities were free to set different limits on how Flock can be used.
“We want to build those guardrails into our system so that every city, county or state can adopt this technology to have both safety and privacy,” he told CNN.
“We can have safety and privacy. Let’s do both,” he added. “Let’s give communities the controls and safeguards to select safety and privacy.”
In the wake of Ayala’s arrest in Milwaukee earlier this year, Chief Jeffrey Norman said he was “extremely disappointed” to learn about the incident and created new auditing processes.
The department now requires officers to provide a case number and explanation for a Flock search, and it began a monthly audit process, police said in a statement.
Chapman, the internal affairs detective, made an initial court appearance Friday on charges of felony misconduct in public office and misdemeanor misuse of a GPS device. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
At his sentencing Wednesday, Ayala apologized for his “poor judgment” that overshadowed his 11 years of service.
His defense and the prosecution had agreed to a plea deal that would result in a fine and no probation or jail time, the attorneys said in court.
However, Milwaukee County Judge Kristela Cervera sentenced him to one year of probation, citing the damage of his actions on the victims – and the community.
“That’s part of the damage that’s been caused here by Mr. Ayala’s actions,” she said. “The loss of faith in the system, the Flock system, that the public was already hesitant with, that could affect policing of cases in Milwaukee County in the future.”
