If you work in law enforcement, you have probably had some version of this conversation in the last three weeks. An officer somewhere gets arrested over an ALPR search. Somebody in the room says the quiet part out loud: our own tools are getting cops locked up now.
I understand why it feels that way. Let me lay out what actually happened, and then tell you why I think the audit trail is the best friend this technology has.
On August 10, three former Bibb County, Georgia deputies were arrested after an internal audit found they had allegedly run license plate searches on people they had personal relationships with. All three face at least one felony stalking count plus violation of oath by a public officer. One faces three stalking counts. The audit that caught it is now run monthly, and Flock itself flagged the irregular pattern first.
They are not alone. Georgia has seen a wave of these cases, including officers in Albany and dismissals in Savannah, with investigations in several other counties. In Texas, the Harris County Sheriff's Office suspended three deputies' access on August 14 pending administrative review. A Deer Park officer was disciplined after an audit showed he had searched a single plate 165 times over several months, with no connected investigation. In Pasadena, a former sergeant surrendered his peace officer license in lieu of criminal prosecution after allegations he used the system to monitor a fellow officer.
Meanwhile, on August 13, Flock announced new anti-misuse safeguards. Harris County adopted them, and now requires a descriptive case code before any plate search. Every attempt is logged.
Here is the part I do not want to skip past, because the grievance is real and I hear it constantly.
Officers tell me the line between a legitimate query and a felony charge feels blurry. Policy and training did not keep up with the technology. A tool got deployed at scale, thousands of people got access, and in a lot of agencies nobody ever sat those officers down and said precisely what a lawful query looks like, what documentation is required, and what happens if you run a plate out of curiosity. Then the audits arrived.
And there is a deeper fear underneath it. These are people who have watched this system recover a stolen car with a toddler inside in a matter of minutes. They believe in it. They are watching a backlash build and they are afraid the tool is going to be taken away from them entirely, and that crimes that would have been solved simply will not be.
That fear is not paranoid. There are real campaigns in multiple cities to rip these systems out. So let me be direct about what is actually putting the tool at risk.
Think about how each of these cases became public. Not through a leak. Not through a lawsuit years later. Through an agency's own audit, in some cases prompted by the vendor's own flagging system, followed by the agency acting on it and saying so out loud.
The Bibb County sheriff put it about as plainly as it can be put. There is a line you do not cross, and no employee is above the standards of the office. He also said he still values the system and is expanding his audits, not abandoning the technology. That is exactly right, and it is the only posture that survives contact with the public.
Because here is the alternative. Imagine none of these audits existed. The misuse would still be happening, because the misuse is not caused by the audit. It would simply surface later, all at once, through a journalist or a lawsuit, with no agency response attached and no evidence that anyone in the profession cared. That is the version where a city council votes the cameras out entirely. An unaudited program is not a safer program for officers. It is a program with a shorter life expectancy.
I have spent 8 years arguing that transparency is a safety measure, usually about school data. This is the same principle wearing a different uniform. What gets counted gets fixed. A system that can prove it catches its own bad actors is a system a community will let you keep.
But accountability only works if it runs in both directions, and this is where I think a lot of agencies have failed the people who work for them.
If you are going to audit an officer's queries, you owe that officer three things first. Clear written policy that defines a permissible purpose in language a patrol deputy can apply at 2 a.m. Real training on that policy, documented, not a memo in an inbox. And a required case code or justification field at the point of search, which is what Harris County just implemented, because a prompt that makes you state your reason before you look is worth more than a report that catches you six weeks later.
Critics have a fair point when they say an audit tool that flags misuse after the fact is better than nothing but is not the same as accountability. The prevention has to happen at the keyboard. That is proactive rather than reactive, which is the argument I make about everything.
None of that excuses running a plate on an ex. That is not a gray area, and the officers I know are the first to say so. But an agency that hands out powerful access with no policy, no training, and no friction, and then acts shocked when the audit comes back ugly, has failed its own people.
If you supervise anyone with ALPR access, answer two questions honestly. Can every one of my people state, in a sentence, what makes a query lawful? And does our system make them record why before they search, or only after? If the answer to the first is no, that is a training failure waiting to become someone's felony. Fix it before the audit does.
I want you to keep this technology. I have seen what it can do for a missing child. Keeping it means proving, in public and on the record, that the profession polices its own. The audit is not what takes the tool away. It is the reason you get to keep it.
For Alex. And for all of them.
Max Schachter
Individual officers facing charges are not named here. All are entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the argument does not depend on their names. Learn more about school safety at schoolsafetydashboard.org.