James Routley

PUBLIC - This article does not require an IPVM subscription. Feel free to share.

While Flock claims its system tracks vehicles, not people, the documented record of police chiefs stalking ex-partners through Flock shows otherwise. When the most experienced, highest-ranking officers in law enforcement, the people most responsible for enforcing the rules, demonstrate ongoing abuses, the answer is the same courts have given for each generation of powerful tracking technology: require a warrant first.

IPVM Image

The police chief of Holiday Hills, Illinois, and a part-time officer at Prairie Grove Police Department, was arrested June 18, 2026, and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony.

Prosecutors alleged he used Prairie Grove's Flock license plate reader system and the Illinois State Police LEADS database to track six people he knew personally.

Three of those people were women the chief had been in romantic relationships with, according to prosecutors at his arraignment. He also tracked an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, running that man's plate 140 times over several months, a figure the protective order petition put at 178, with 86 of those searches conducted while off duty.

In September 2025, the chief called the man and left a voicemail on his police phone, per a petition for a no-contact order the man later filed:

This is the only time I'm going to be nice about this.

The misconduct spanned 18 months, from February 26, 2024, to November 5, 2025. A judge denied the man's protective order petition in February 2026. The chief was arrested on a criminal warrant four months later, still listed as the Holiday Hills police official. The village said it was "surprised" by the charges.

A Pattern Flock's CLO Acknowledged

The chief's arrest extends a documented pattern of Flock LPR being used by law enforcement to track romantic partners and rivals. The Institute for Justice, pursuing a constitutional challenge to Flock's system, counted at least 18 such cases nationwide as of mid-2026, describing the total as "almost certainly an undercount."

Among the highest-profile recent cases: Braselton, Georgia police chief was arrested in November 2025 following a GBI audit log review, after the abuse had already occurred, not before. A Jerome County, Idaho, Sheriff ran his wife's plate more than 700 times in three months, labeling each search "test," before retiring. Sedgwick, Kansas police chief ran his ex-girlfriend's plate 164 times and her new boyfriend's 64 times before resigning.

The same pattern appears at lower ranks. A Milwaukee officer tracked a partner and her ex over 100 times, with the abuse surfacing through a third-party website after months of undetected access. A Costa Mesa, California officer continued accessing Flock to locate his mistress after being placed on administrative leave.

In a May 2026 radio appearance on Maine's Morning News, IPVM found Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley making an offhand admission that cuts against the company's standard deflections:

Very rarely, someone does something stupid. They use it to figure out where an ex-girlfriend is or something like that. That's actually the most common thing.

He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.

Chiefs Show Flock Tracks People

Flock's public position, stated by Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas in a company video on its Trust page, is that the system tracks vehicles exclusively: "There's a common misconception that Flock tracks you wherever you go, and that's just not the case."

The chief-level cases demonstrate what that framing conceals. A chief running a romantic rival's plate 140 times is tracking a person. The vehicle is the mechanism. The person is the target. That is the purpose of the search, and the documented cases confirm it at every rank.

Flock's own CLO confirmed the connection. In a video on the same Trust page, Haley stated that license plates "are required specifically to correlate to ownership of that vehicle." A plate read is, by legal design, a record tied to a specific person. As IPVM analyzed in "Flock Tracks You": Execs Contradiction Reveals Reality, the two executives' statements, placed side by side, dismantle the company's own tracking denial.

The rank of those involved matters beyond the individual cases. Police chiefs set policy, supervise officers, enforce use agreements, and bear responsibility for compliance. They are also among the most experienced people in law enforcement, late in their careers, with decades of training. These chiefs are not junior officers who did not understand the rules. They wrote the rules. When that cohort is among those who misuse the tool, internal training or disciplinary policies alone do not serve as adequate checks.

The emotional dimension explains the danger. Romantic relationships, jealousy, and rivalry are among the most powerful forces in human experience. Flock places precise, real-time tracking of any vehicle's location at an officer's fingertips with no prior authorization required. The documented cases are the predictable result.

LPR Has Value

Flock and law enforcement regularly cite documented cases where LPR helped solve violent crimes, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing persons. Those outcomes are real. The ACLU, EFF, and Institute for Justice have each explicitly stated their position: they support warrant-based use of LPR. Their challenge targets the absence of pre-use oversight, with the cameras accepted as legitimate tools.

Flock has argued that warrant requirements would cost lives. As IPVM analyzed in Why Flock's Lives-At-Stake Argument Against Warrants Is Unsound, that argument fails to engage with existing legal doctrine. The exigent circumstances exception already permits warrantless action in cases of genuine imminent danger, including active pursuits and emergency responses. The warrant requirement being proposed applies to routine, passive searches of stored LPR data, the category every stalking case in the documented pattern falls into, and not to the millions of passive plate reads the system logs automatically each day.

Warrants Apply to Every Comparable Technology

Police have encountered this problem with other powerful tracking tools, and courts and legislatures have responded consistently. Attaching a GPS tracker to a vehicle requires a warrant under United States v. Jones (2012). Historical cell phone location data requires a warrant under Carpenter v. United States (2018). Wiretaps require a warrant under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (1968). Cell-site simulators are subject to warrant requirements under DOJ policy, although that policy is not law. Flock LPR queries are accessible without prior judicial authorization.

The Day Is Here

The day when courts require warrants for LPR use is, by Flock's own CLO's admission, already foreseeable. IPVM found him saying so in passing on a podcast, as reported in Flock Chief Attorney Admits Time Will Come To Require Warrants:

There will come a time where, as the judge said in the Norfolk decision just last week, this technology could get ubiquitous enough and powerful enough that there needs to be a warrant requirement for its use. That day in the future is out there.

The documented cases show why. Officers at the highest ranks of law enforcement are on record using Flock to track romantic partners and rivals, with no judge ever asked to justify a single search. The exigent circumstances exception already preserves warrantless access for genuine emergencies. For everything else, the case for requiring warrants was made by the officers Flock trusted most.

More on Flock From IPVM

Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed