Police say Flock is invaluable. But as misuse mounts, many wonder how to rein in the surveillance system

The new headlines seem to pop up daily.

The Flock cameras were allegedly used by a former sheriff’s deputy in Wisconsin's Kenosha County to stalk his then-girlfriend, who also worked as a deputy sheriff. In McHenry County, a police chief allegedly searched their vast network of automated cameras nearly 250 times to track former romantic partners and others connected to them.

In northwest Indiana, three misuse cases emerged in just one week, while officers in Bloomingdale, West Chicago, Itasca and Channahon have been put on administrative leave for alleged improper use.

Automated license plate readers — increasingly synonymous with Flock, though there are other brands on the market — photograph the license plates and other identifiers of passing vehicles. Police officers are then able to search and share the data for investigations.

But a growing number of cops throughout the Chicago area and across the country have been accused of searching those databases for personal reasons. Civil liberties activists too are alarmed that law enforcement departments could use the cameras to work with immigration officials or surveil ordinary citizens.

As allegations of misuse mount, police departments and lawmakers are grappling with what must be done to prevent wrongdoing.

Suburban police chiefs told the Tribune safeguards are necessary, but that the cameras remain invaluable tools in solving — or even stopping — crime. Meanwhile, Illinois state lawmakers are proposing new restrictions and towns are adjusting or canceling contracts. Passionate neighbors, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, are pushing to do away with the technology entirely.

“Every time you give a bunch of workers access to a database like this, there is going to be the temptation for them to search it for personal ends,” said Matthew Kugler, a law professor at Northwestern University.

“This is why hospitals do so much HIPAA training,” Kugler added, referring to federal patient privacy regulation. “The way you stop it is through training and auditing and controls.”

But Kugler said the concern goes beyond individual officers misusing the system. License plate readers have existed for decades; what has changed is the ability to combine millions of photos into centralized databases that can be searched almost instantly to reconstruct where a vehicle has traveled.

Flock Safety didn’t respond directly to questions for this article, but referred the Tribune to its website, where it says, “We protect your privacy rights by building limits into the system, giving local agencies control and maintaining accountability by making usage reviewable.”

Police departments consider reform

The way Ryan Gulli sees it, there’s been three substantial advancements in law enforcement during his career. The first two are fingerprints and DNA evidence. The third, more recent development, is Flock cameras.

Gulli is the chief of police in Manhattan, a Will County village that has about 15 cameras, he said. Manhattan first got them in 2022, and Gulli said they’ve helped speed up criminal investigations and find missing people, including those with Alzheimer's or dementia.

“Can we operate without Flock cameras? Absolutely,” Gulli said. “Do we want to? Probably not.”

But, he said, such a powerful tool requires “transparency, oversight, security and reasonable use.” The department posts a transparency portal, which shows how many searches the department has run in the past 30 days and the reasoning behind each one.

Many departments in Will County beefed up their internal policies before the board last month voted to approve intergovernmental agreements for Flock cameras.

“As partisan as the board can be, this was a complete nonpartisan issue,” Mokena Police Chief Brian Benton said of concerns over the technology. “Republicans as well as Democrats felt strongly.”

Benton said officers now must both input a reason for running a search as well as a case number. Vague explanations like “suspected criminal activity” aren’t acceptable.

He hopes it would prevent cases like that alleged in Kenosha County. Frank McGrath, who was charged with two felony counts of misconduct in public office last month, listed the reason for at least 16 questionable searches as simply “suspicious,” according to a criminal complaint.

McGrath allegedly looked up the make, color and license plate of his then-girlfriend’s car, even writing in a text message that running her plate so many times “makes me look really, really bad.” He didn’t respond to a phone call seeking comment.

“When we do the audit, we can trace it back to a purpose,” Benton said. “So if you put a fake number in there, we do an audit and it comes back as fake. You lied to use the system, and there's your discipline.”

As scrutiny heightened, Flock also introduced a feature called “audit assistance,” which is designed to detect “abnormal activity” and flag it to police administrators. Access would be automatically suspended until the behavior is reviewed.

Flock said one-third of its customers have voluntarily adopted the feature, and that it will require it by the end of the year.

The Lake County Sheriff’s Office is also internally reviewing its officers' use of the cameras monthly, which they increased from annually previously, said Christopher Covelli, the public information officer. They reduced the time they store images to 14 days rather than 30.

The same license plate run under two separate report numbers or the same license plate run repeatedly in a short period of time could be considered suspicious, he said.

“The more oversight you have on a program like this, the better it is to ensure compliance,” Covelli said.

Illinois State Police, which has 807 Motorola automatic license plate readers across the state, including 402 on Cook County expressways, also audits monthly and requires a “valid case number” and “authorized purpose” to perform a search, said spokesperson Melaney Arnold. Cameras can only be used for “serious criminal offenses” like vehicular hijacking, she said.

Perhaps most importantly, Gulli said officers who commit wrongdoing must be held accountable to maintain public trust. Nobody dislikes a dirty cop more than a good cop, he said.

“I think there should be zero tolerance for this stuff,” Gulli said. “It’s a very good police tool. And you know how it is, the good things people ruin.”

‘He knows everything about me’

But Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, said the outpouring of misconduct cases shortly after Flock released its auditing tool demonstrates why police can’t be the only ones policing themselves.

If cops were required to obtain a warrant to search the databases, they would have to prove they were searching for evidence of a crime and not conducting a “fishing expedition.” Officers stalking their exes wouldn’t apply for a search warrant, he said.

“We have these constitutional protections that add friction before police can invade people's privacy, even if doing so would be useful for fighting crime,” he said.

One man had never even met the Holiday Hills police chief and part-time Prairie Grove officer accused of tracking him, his attorneys told the Tribune. He had dated a woman the officer also once dated.

“I fear for my kids’ safety as they drive my car sometimes when they are home from college,” he wrote in a petition for an order of protection. “Those (automated license plate readers) are near my house as well so he knows everything about me and I’m fearful for my safety.”

He wrote that William Copp, who now faces felony misconduct charges, had searched for him 178 times in the Flock system. Copp looked up people he knew, including this man and former romantic partners, hundreds of times in 2024 and 2025, prosecutors allege. Copp’s attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.

More safeguards are needed to prevent repeated monthslong misconduct, said Jordan Greenberg, one of the man’s attorneys. Requiring warrants or only giving specific people access to the system could be options, he said.

“We definitely hope to see accountability because I'm all for good police officers, and I think the bad ones need to be held accountable,” Greenberg said.

State Rep. Nicolle Grasse, an Arlington Heights Democrat, said she’s trying to do just that. She’s co-sponsoring the Automated License Plate Recognition System Act, which would limit the sort of crimes the cameras could be used to investigate and require agencies to delete data within three days, among other provisions. The bill is still in committee.

“We shouldn't just leave this wealth of data around to be searched later for whatever purpose,” said Ed Yohnka, a spokesperson for the ACLU of Illinois, which is also supporting the legislation. “That could end up catching and abusing the privacy of folks simply because you know they happen to be in a particular place at a particular time.”

Grasse got involved after the Illinois secretary of state reported last year that police in Texas accessed data from Mount Prospect, which is located in her district, while searching for a woman they said had a self-administered abortion. (Flock has alleged the woman was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.)

Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias’ office said at the time that it had instructed Flock to cut off access to out-of-state authorities illegally using the system. Then, a couple of months later, the secretary of state ordered Flock to shut off access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection after a state audit found that the federal agency had illegally gotten in.

In response, Evanston deactivated its cameras. Homer Glen voted last month to suspend its Flock program after alleged misuse was discovered in Will County.

Local police departments running afoul of state law could lose access to Illinois data as well as their eligibility for federal and state grants, Giannoulias said.

“These audits are one of the most important tools we have to ensure accountability and compliance with Illinois law, and our office will continue to conduct them in an effort to protect people’s private data,” Giannoulias said.

Neighbors take action

Curtis Evans has spent the past month biking through the northern suburbs in search of the automated cameras, marking each one he finds with neon pink poster board.

He said he’s found them along major roadways and in quiet neighborhoods, above the access road to the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie and pointed toward the entrance of a middle school in Wilmette.

“People are driving by these cameras all day, everywhere,” the 66-year-old Evanston resident said. “Whether you're breaking the law or not, you're in the system.”

Many share Evans’ skepticism, showing up to board meetings and protests carrying signs that say “Get the Flock out.” Damion Burciaga said he didn’t grasp the scale of the technology until he found a camera just blocks from his home. He worries there are too few limits on it.

“There's just so much space between a criminal and my grandma or somebody random driving around,” he said. “Who chooses who is suspicious?”

In Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood, Alonso Zaragoza said some residents take longer routes to avoid cameras, particularly as immigration enforcement increased fears about where vehicle data could end up.

But in Nicki Visco’s experience, it’s not so simple. Her oldest son, Spencer, had been living in his Edgewater apartment for only a few months when he walked out to his building’s paid parking lot in May and found his car gone. Newly employed, he’d been driving the family’s Dodge Charger until he could save enough for something of his own.

He immediately reported the car stolen to Chicago police, who warned him that the odds of recovering it were slim. But the next morning, officers called and said a Flock camera had led them to the Charger in a parking lot on the city’s West Side.

“We felt like it was a divine intervention,” said Visco, 60, who lives in Schaumburg. “The cops said it truly never happens, so it really was a miracle.”

As reports of Flock misuse continue to trouble Visco, she can’t discount how the technology helped her family.

“It's out of control. They can be abused, and I understand this is a very scary thing,” she said. “But that said, were it not for that camera, we wouldn't have gotten our car back.”

Also in June, Lake County sheriff’s detectives used Flock to help locate and rescue a girl under the age of 14 from a man who allegedly traveled to the far north suburbs from Georgia to pick her up, said Covelli, the department’s spokesman.

The girl’s family woke up and found that their daughter wasn’t in the house and wasn’t carrying her cellphone, Covelli said.

Detectives determined she had been talking to a man from Georgia and used the cameras to find a vehicle that traveled near her home with a Georgia license plate. Officers then found his vehicle in the Independence Grove Forest Preserve near Libertyville, he said.

“If it weren't for that ability to quickly find her location, she could have been out of the state or over border lines within 24 hours,” Covelli said.

rjohnson@chicagotribune.com; lhempel-edgers@chicagotribune.com