Former Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala pled guilty to charges that he used his police department's license plate reader system more than 100 times to track the cars of an ex-girlfriend and her partner, according to a criminal complaint.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation announced that it arrested former Bonner Springs detective Kyle Rector for allegedly using that department's license plate readers to track his wife and two men he thought were her romantic partners.

Deputy Lamar Roman of the Monroe County Sheriff's Office in Florida was arrested and fired after being accused of using state and national police databases to track the car of a woman he was romantically interested in, according to the sheriff's office.

All that was just since March.

Across the country, law enforcement officials have been caught using automated license plate readers, police databases and other surveillance technology to spy on and stalk people in their personal lives, mostly women.

These instances of misuse highlight the need for greater limits and oversight, including warrant requirements and strict auditing, when it comes to police use of public surveillance equipment, privacy advocates say.

But the stories also illustrate the almost inevitable consequences of blanketing communities with cameras and license plate readers that track people's every move, some of these advocates warn.

"Police work is rapidly being shifted from 'We wait till we have a suspect and then we go gather data' to 'Let's just gather data on everybody and then we can pick out a suspect from all that data,'" Electronic Frontier Foundation senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia told Law360.

"And the collection of all of this data on everyone has proven a very tempting thing for police officers who want to spy on people," Guariglia said.

Lack of Oversight Leads to Misuse

There have been at least 16 publicly reported incidents in which law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, Kansas, Florida, California and elsewhere have been accused or convicted of misusing police surveillance equipment for personal reasons, according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, civil liberties-focused public interest law firm.

"I am extremely disappointed to learn about the incident and expect all members, sworn and civilian, to demonstrate the highest ethical standards in the performance of their duties. If a member violates the code of conduct, they will be held accountable," Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey B. Norman said in a statement when now-ex officer Ayala was caught misusing surveillance technology.

Most of the other implicated police departments and sheriff's offices did not respond to requests for comment.

But it's impossible to know how often this misuse is really happening since much of it likely goes unreported, according to surveillance experts.

"What we have is probably just the tip of the iceberg," said Institute for Justice attorney Michael Soyfer, who is currently involved in litigation against Norfolk, Virginia, and San Jose, California, over those municipalities' warrantless use of surveillance technology. "I think we are probably aware of very few of the instances of misuse that are happening nationwide."

Nearly all instances of misuse that are known about involved male police officers stalking or spying on female romantic partners, according to experts, who warn that unaccountable police surveillance can strip protections from domestic violence victims and can even be called "gendered violence," according to Guariglia.

Automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, are one of the technologies most ripe for this kind of abuse given their growing ubiquity and the real-time information they can provide about the location of any car, according to experts.

Flock Safety — one of the most popular vendors of ALPR systems and the company whose cameras and databases have been involved in the most instances of abuse, according to the Institute for Justice — claims to have cameras in more than 5,000 communities across 49 states, conducting more than 20 billion license plate scans per month, according to the company's website.

The computer-controlled cameras are typically mounted on street poles and streetlights, highway overpasses and mobile trailers, and are usually connected to a solar panel. Mobile ALPRs also can be mounted on police vehicles. The cameras automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the date and time of each capture.

"If you're a stalker, this technology is a godsend. It basically creates a database of the location of where your car is captured, so it's a giant log of your movements throughout the city," said Jon McCray Jones, a policy analyst at the Wisconsin chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

And there's little transparency or oversight when it comes to how police departments use these systems, experts warn.

Many departments don't yet have standardized policies for how ALPRs and other public surveillance systems can and should be used, according to Cleveland State University College of Law professor Brian E. Ray, who directs the Center for Cybersecurity and Privacy Protection.

Police don't need a warrant to comb through the databases compiled by ALPRs, experts say.

And few law enforcement agencies audit their officers' use of these systems, according to Soyfer. During the course of his litigation against Norfolk, he found that no one in that city's police department had ever looked at their data or even downloaded the audit file that Flock makes available to its customers.

It took Norfolk police months to establish an audit process after Soyfer asked for the data during discovery, he said.

"If a public company audited its books the way Norfolk audits its Flock data, there would be a wave of shareholder lawsuits and SEC enforcement actions," Soyfer quipped. "It would be a huge scandal."

Flock's Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley emphasized the success of the company's technologies in a statement to Law360, saying its equipment has contributed to solving more than a million crimes and has over 140,000 monthly active users.

"We are aware of a very small number of incidents of abuse, each of which was surfaced because of the transparency and accountability features deliberately built into our platform. Humans are fallible; unlike most tools provided to law enforcement, Flock ensures that in the rare instances when our technology is misused, the evidence of that misuse, which is used to hold responsible parties accountable, is right there in our system," Haley said.

But much of the reported abuse wasn't found through police or Flock audits of officers' use but by the people being stalked, according to experts.

Some of those victims learned of the stalking by searching for themselves on haveibeenflocked.com, a website that tracks license plate queries of Flock databases using audit logs provided by government agencies in response to open records requests.

"The most pressing issue right now is just the complete lack of transparency and oversight," said Hendrik van Pelt, who operates the site. "Everything is kind of hidden away behind a single corporation that is literally placing black boxes on the side of the road collecting data, and it's virtually impossible to get any insight into how anyone is using it."

"Inv," "Sus" and "La la la la la la"  

Even if a police department wanted to review its officers' searches of Flock or other surveillance databases, it would be nearly impossible to do so since the reasons many officers input when searching those databases are so vague as to be meaningless, according to experts.

In Wisconsin — where at least 221 police departments use Flock cameras and where there have been at least four incidents in which officers have been accused of misusing surveillance equipment for personal reasons — the most common explanation given for searching those databases is "investigation," according to McCray Jones.

In fact, for 13.5% of the more than 184.2 million unique license plate searches that had been logged by haveibeenflocked.com as of June 1, the reason recorded for the search was just three or fewer characters, such as "inv" for "investigation" and "sus," for "suspect," according to van Pelt.

Police entered a one-character rationale for almost 2 million searches, van Pelt said.

The most common reasons Norfolk police cited for database searches were "investigation," "criminal justice," "police" and "various misspellings of those," Soyfer said about what he's seen.

One officer wrote "la la la la la la," several dozen times, he added.

"You would think things like that would at least result in some form of discipline, even if it's pretty mild like a reprimand or a talking-to, but no one was even bothering to look at this, so no one noticed," Soyfer said.

Warrants, Auditing, Civilian Control

Better guardrails governing law enforcement's use of public surveillance technology could help prevent this kind of misuse, according to experts.

For starters, judicial warrants should be required before police can search databases that store citizens' license plate locations and other information, since warrant applications are made under oath and police officers who lie in warrant requests are committing perjury, they say.

"So having a warrant requirement is not only a gatekeeping mechanism where the judge can deny a warrant, but it deters officers from submitting abusive or frivolous warrants requests and searching the system for things like stalking their exes," Soyfer said.

Law enforcement agencies should also put in place standardized use policies for these technologies that define who can use them, when and in what situations, according to Ray.

Those guidelines should contain strict data-retention limits, according to Ray and McCray Jones, who added that data should only be stored for 15 to 30 days unless it's part of an active investigation.

Experts also say they'd like to see more rigorous auditing of how these databases are being used by police, including requiring more detailed reasons for searches, and tighter controls on who has access to the data.

"Departments should be thinking about whether all the people they're granting access really need access and whether they should all have access to the same kind and scope of data," Soyfer said.

And all of these decisions should be made by civilian officials and the community, through policies enacted by city councils, not by the police, according to experts.

These are just some of the guardrails four Milwaukee aldermen and alderwomen insisted be put in place in a March letter they sent to the Milwaukee Board of Fire and Police Commissioners after now-former police officer Ayala was charged with misconduct in public office for using an ALPR system to track his ex's car, according to one of those aldermen, Alex Brower.

"Since that letter was written, we've actually had a second investigation launched into another member of the police department here in Milwaukee," Brower said.

Brower told Law360 that if collecting all this data is necessary — which he isn't convinced it is — he'd at least like to see that data taken out of the possession of private companies like Flock.

"I don't think that a for-profit company should have its hands in public safety," Brower said.

Brower isn't alone in questioning the need for ALPR and other public surveillance systems in the wake of the misuse allegations.

Growing discomfort with the technology has led about 60 towns and counties, including Eugene, Oregon; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Dane County, Wisconsin, to cancel their Flock contracts, reject proposed Flock contracts or deactivate their Flock cameras since the beginning of 2025, according to anti-ALPR website DeFlock.

City workers in cities like Dayton, Ohio, and Evanston, Illinois, have even begun covering their cities' Flock cameras, in some cases with trash bags.

Stories of police officers' misuse of these systems to stalk and spy on people in their personal lives is contributing to that backlash, according to experts, who say the sheer ubiquity of ALPRs and other surveillance equipment makes their abuse almost inevitable.

And the lack of transparency and accountability that enables that abuse extends to even legitimate police use of these massive surveillance systems, they warn.

"It is a symptom of a larger issue of the casualness with which police use this giant surveillance apparatus at their fingertips," Guariglia said. "And it speaks to a feeling of impunity that officers don't really feel bad or guilty or like they're going to get in trouble for very casually using all of these tools."

--Editing by Tim Ruel.

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