When the Cops Using the Cameras Are the Same Ones Who Approved Them

The Arrest: Holiday Hills, Prairie Grove, and 18 Months of Plate Reads

The numbers tell the story.

The police chief of Holiday Hills, Illinois, a village of roughly 600 people in McHenry County northwest of Chicago, was arrested June 18, 2026 on a criminal warrant and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony ^[1][6]. The chief was simultaneously a part-time officer at the Prairie Grove Police Department in the same county. That is two law-enforcement employers, two sets of credentials, two query-capable accounts into systems that include Flock and the Illinois State Police LEADS database ^[1][2].

Prosecutors alleged at his arraignment that he used Prairie Grove's Flock license-plate-reader system and the LEADS database to track six people he knew personally. Three of those six were women with whom the chief had been in romantic relationships ^[2].

The fourth target was the new boyfriend of one of those women. The chief ran that man's plate 140 times over several months, a figure the protective-order petition put at 178 queries total, with 86 of those conducted while the chief was off duty ^[1][6].

In September 2025 the chief called the man on his police phone and left a voicemail, per the no-contact-order petition the man later filed. The voicemail transcript, quoted in the petition, reads: "This is the only time I'm going to be nice about this." ^[6]

The misconduct spanned 18 months, from February 26, 2024 to November 5, 2025 ^[1]. A judge denied the man's protective-order petition in February 2026. The chief was arrested on the criminal warrant four months later, still listed as the Holiday Hills police official. The village said in a public statement that it was "surprised" by the charges ^[1][6].

The pattern matters more than the arrest. This was not a single rogue officer who happened to have Flock credentials. This was a sitting police chief, with two decades of experience, who set policy for the officers beneath him, ran the system the way the system was designed to be run, and got caught because the man's no-contact petition put the voicemail and the query counts into the public record.

The Pattern: 18 Documented Cases, All the Same Shape

The Holiday Hills chief is not an outlier. He is the 18th.

IPVM's June 22 public report identified at least 18 cases nationwide of law-enforcement officers using Flock LPR systems to stalk romantic partners, ex-partners, or personal rivals. The Institute for Justice, which is pursuing a separate constitutional challenge to Flock's platform, had previously counted the same cases and described the total as "almost certainly an undercount" ^[1][3].

The cases run the rank structure from chief down to line officer, and the geography from Georgia to Idaho to Kansas to California to Illinois.

Braselton, Georgia police chief was arrested in November 2025 following a Georgia Bureau of Investigation audit log review. The arrest came after the abuse had already occurred, not before. The GBI caught the chief through the query log, not the system ^[1].

Jerome County, Idaho sheriff ran his wife's plate more than 700 times in three months. Each query was labeled "test" in the audit log. He retired before any criminal case could be brought ^[1].

Sedgwick, Kansas police chief ran his ex-girlfriend's plate 164 times and her new boyfriend's plate 64 times before resigning ^[1][7].

Milwaukee officer tracked a partner and her ex more than 100 times. The abuse surfaced through a third-party website that publishes public-sector query logs, after months of undetected access through the officer's department-issued credentials ^[1].

Costa Mesa, California officer continued accessing Flock to locate his mistress after he had been placed on administrative leave. The case documents the access window for terminated or suspended credentials, which on Flock's platform can remain active past the termination date ^[1].

Read those five cases and the Holiday Hills case together and the shape is identical. A high-ranking officer, with legitimate credentials, runs plate queries against vehicles belonging to people he has a personal interest in. The queries are conducted inside the legitimate-access envelope. The abuse vector is the system, used the way it is designed to be used, by the people it was designed to be used by.

What Flock Says vs. What the Chiefs Do

Flock has a public position. The position is contradicted by the company's own executives on the company's own website.

Flock Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas recorded a video for the company's Trust page in which he addressed the central critique head-on. "There's a common misconception that Flock tracks you wherever you go," Thomas said, "and that's just not the case" ^[1].

Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley recorded a separate video for the same Trust page. In that video, Haley explained why license plates exist at all. Plates, Haley said, "are required specifically to correlate to ownership of that vehicle" ^[1].

Place those two statements side by side. If Flock's system does not track people wherever they go, then a Flock plate query cannot return a vehicle owner's name, address, or travel history. If a Flock plate query does return a vehicle owner's name, address, and travel history, then Flock's system does track people wherever they go. The two statements are mutually exclusive. They sit on the same page of the company's own website. IPVM's prior analysis broke the contradiction down line by line ^[4].

Haley went further in a separate appearance. On Maine's Morning News in May 2026, IPVM surfaced Haley making an offhand admission about who uses Flock for what. "Very rarely," Haley said, "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" ^[1].

Read that quote twice. Haley says the behavior is "very rare" in one breath, and then identifies it as "actually the most common thing" in the next. The IPVM framing is correct: the tension between the two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.

The Holiday Hills arrest makes Haley's "very rare" claim visibly false. Eighteen documented cases across at least a dozen states, including three sitting or former police chiefs, all using the same system for the same purpose, is not rare. It is the most common form of LPR misuse, per the company's own CLO ^[1].

What Flock's CLO Admits About Warrants

The most important sentence in the IPVM report is one that Flock's own lawyer said.

On a podcast appearance IPVM identified in a separate report, Dan Haley addressed the warrant question directly. The exchange, as IPVM transcribed it, runs:

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.

That is the chief legal officer of Flock Safety, the largest ALPR vendor in the United States, conceding that the warrant day is foreseeable ^[1][5].

The Norfolk decision he is referencing is the Fourth Circuit ruling in Schmidt v. Norfolk, which applied the mosaic theory of Fourth Amendment doctrine to sustained ALPR tracking. That ruling is the leading federal appellate signal that the warrant gap is closing ^[5].

Flock has argued, separately, that warrant requirements would cost lives. IPVM dismantled that argument in a separate analysis. The exigent-circumstances exception already permits warrantless action in cases of genuine imminent danger, including active pursuits, emergency responses, and missing-person cases. The warrant requirement that proponents are advancing applies to routine, passive searches of stored LPR data, the category every stalking case in the documented pattern falls into, not to the millions of passive plate reads the system logs automatically each day ^[1].

Why Warrants Are the Standard Fix: Every Comparable Technology Already Requires One

The legal-doctrine argument for LPR warrants is not novel. It is settled doctrine applied to four prior generations of tracking technology, and every court that has been asked has said yes.

Attaching a GPS tracker to a vehicle requires a warrant. The Supreme Court said so in United States v. Jones (2012), a 9-0 ruling that the government's attachment of a GPS device to a suspect's vehicle, and the subsequent month-long monitoring of the vehicle's movements, constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment ^[1].

Historical cell phone location data requires a warrant. The Supreme Court said so in Carpenter v. United States (2018), a 5-4 ruling that the government's acquisition of historical cell-site location information from a wireless carrier was a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Court explicitly rejected the third-party doctrine as applied to location data ^[1].

Wiretaps require a warrant under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which has been the controlling statute for real-time audio surveillance for nearly sixty years ^[1].

Cell-site simulators, the Stingray-class devices that mimic cell towers to identify phones in an area, are subject to DOJ policy that requires a warrant, though that policy is not statute. The warrant expectation is now the operational norm across federal law enforcement ^[1].

Flock LPR queries are accessible without any prior judicial authorization. No warrant. No probable-cause finding. No judicial review of the query, the subject, or the historical pattern. The system is the audit layer, and the audit layer is reactive. By the time a query shows up in the log, the officer has already received the address, the travel history, and the person's identity. The warrant question is whether the query should be possible without a judge's sign-off. The comparable cases say yes, the warrant should be required.

Why It Matters: The Rank of the People Doing It

The cases that should worry you are not the patrol-officer cases. They are the chief cases.

Police chiefs set policy. They supervise officers. They enforce use agreements with vendors like Flock. They 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 misusing the tool, internal training and disciplinary policies do not serve as adequate checks. The Holiday Hills chief supervised the officers who would have been required to report him. The Sedgwick chief supervised the officers who would have been required to report her. The Braselton chief set the access-control policy that let him query the system unchecked. The audit log caught all three. The audit log caught all three after the fact. That is what audit logs do.

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. If you build a system that lets a police chief run his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend's plate 178 times without anyone asking why, the system will get used that way.

Flock has framed the issue as a few bad actors using a good tool. The 18 cases say the system is the abuse vector. The company's own CLO, on the company's own podcast appearances, has conceded as much. The legal doctrine that already covers GPS trackers, cell-tower records, and wiretaps is the doctrine the courts will extend to LPR queries. The question is not whether that day comes. The question is how many more Holiday Hills chiefs get arrested before it arrives.

What You Can Do This Week

The legal fix is going to take years. The personal fix is available now.

Find out whether your city runs Flock. Deflock publishes a map of every Flock camera in the United States at deflock.org. Type in your address. See how many cameras cover your commute, your kid's school, your doctor's office, your place of worship. The cameras record every plate that passes, regardless of who owns the car ^[8].

Check your state's ACLU chapter. The ACLU has been the leading litigator on LPR warrant requirements at the state level. Your state chapter will know whether your state has an active Flock-warrant bill in the current legislative session, and whether your jurisdiction has been named in the Institute for Justice's pending constitutional challenge. The legal pipeline that produced Washington SB 6002 and Kentucky HB 58 is running in other states now ^[9].

Watch the state-level bill pipeline. Washington SB 6002, the Driver Privacy Act, was the first state-level Flock-specific warrant bill, signed into Washington law in 2026. Kentucky HB 58, the 90-day-data-retention-limit bill, was the first retention reform. Colorado SB 26-070, Minnesota HF 4205, and Oregon's pending ALPR regulation bill are the next wave. If your state legislature is in session, your state senator's office will know whether a comparable bill has been introduced ^[10][11].

Read the Institute for Justice filings. IJ is litigating the constitutional challenge to Flock's system. The case filings name the specific jurisdictions whose police departments have signed Flock contracts. If your city is on the list, your city council has decided to participate in a surveillance network where the documented failure mode is the abuse of the system by the people most responsible for enforcing the rules ^[3].

The structural condition is the system. The fix is warrants. The people who wrote the system's terms of service have already conceded, on the record, that the fix is coming. The question is whether it gets here before the next police chief decides to find out where his ex-girlfriend's boyfriend lives tonight.

Sources

1. IPVM: "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed (Public Report)" (June 22, 2026; the primary anchor for the Holiday Hills case, the 18-case national pattern, the CCO + CLO statements, and the warrant legal doctrine comparators)
2. Lake McHenry Scanner: "Prosecutors say McHenry County police chief used Flock license plate reader data hundreds of times to track people he knew" (June 19, 2026; arraignment coverage, the three-women framing, the 140-query count, and the LEADS cross-reference)
3. Institute for Justice: "Police have reportedly used license plate readers to stalk romantic interests at least 14 times in recent years" (mid-2026 count; the IJ tally that IPVM extended to 18 in the June 22 report, and the pending constitutional challenge to Flock's system)
4. IPVM: ""Flock Tracks You": Execs Contradiction Reveals Reality" (the prior IPVM analysis that dismantled the CCO Josh Thomas and CLO Dan Haley Trust-page statements side by side)
5. IPVM: "Flock Chief Attorney Admits Time Will Come To Require Warrants" (the source podcast for the Dan Haley warrant quote, plus the Schmidt v. Norfolk Fourth Circuit reference)
6. Shaw Local / Northwest Herald: "Holiday Hills police chief charged with official misconduct was also Prairie Grove cop" (June 18, 2026; the protective-order petition, the voicemail quote, and the dual-jurisdiction employment confirmation)
7. Kansas.com: "Sedgwick police chief ran plates ex-girlfriend" (the Kansas outlet coverage of the 164 + 64 plate-read pattern, and the resignation)
8. Deflock: Locate Flock Safety cameras in your area (the camera-location map that is the standing reference for citizen-side ALPR visibility)
9. American Civil Liberties Union: License Plate Readers (the ACLU's standing LPR policy page and state-chapter directory)
10. State of Surveillance: "Washington SB 6002 Driver Privacy Act: ALPR Warrant Bill" (the standing coverage of the state-level Flock warrant bill template, first to be signed into law)
11. State of Surveillance: "Colorado SB 26-070 Flock ALPR Warrant Bill (2026)" (the second-wave Colorado bill, the ALPR warrant requirement modeled on Washington)
12. Hacker News discussion thread: "Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed" (249 points, 88 comments, posted 2026-06-22 19:13 UTC; the IPVM-cross-posted HN thread that surfaced the story to a wider audience, with the Carpenter v. Jones mosaic-theory subthread as the dominant engagement signal)