Cops Caught Stalking Exes With Flock

August 28, 2026

When the sitting governor of one of the most heavily surveilled states in the country stands at a podium and says a police technology has gotten “out of control,” it is worth asking what changed — because license plate readers didn’t start as a surveillance tool at all. They started as a toll-collection device, and the distance between that original purpose and where the technology now sits reveals something durable about how surveillance infrastructure expands once it exists.

At a Glance

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called Flock Safety’s AI-enabled license plate readers “out of control” at an August 2026 press event and urged the legislature to impose guardrails.
The cameras began as tolling infrastructure but have expanded into networked criminal-surveillance databases used by local police and sheriffs statewide.
Documented misuse cases — including officers allegedly using the system to track an estranged wife and an ex-girlfriend — have fueled bipartisan backlash from Florida’s GOP chairman, a gubernatorial candidate, and civil liberties groups alike.
Dozens of municipalities nationwide have dropped Flock contracts, even as courts remain split on whether the technology violates constitutional privacy protections.
Florida’s legislature is already moving bills adding privacy limits, though enforcement agencies warn tighter restrictions could hamper investigations into missing persons and trafficking cases.

From Toll Booths to a Statewide Tracking Grid

Automated license plate recognition technology entered Florida roads as an administrative convenience: cameras mounted at toll gantries reading plates so drivers wouldn’t need to stop. DeSantis has been explicit that this is the use case he still endorses, distinguishing it from what the technology became. “These cameras, the license plate readers… I think it’s out of control,” he said at a Florida International University press event, describing a shift from tolling into what he called “actual criminal surveillance” conducted by local police and sheriff’s departments. The distinction matters because tolling systems were never designed to build a searchable, networked record of where any given driver has been — Flock’s system does exactly that, linking cameras across jurisdictions into a shared database.

DeSantis has pointed to specific abuse cases rather than abstract fears. He cited an incident in which a Haines City officer allegedly used the database to track an estranged wife roughly 700 times, and a separate case involving a Sarasota officer allegedly monitoring an ex-girlfriend through the same system. He also raised concern that state agencies themselves lack visibility into how local departments use the technology, noting that when he asked whether the state receives any of the data collected, the answer was no — local agencies operate largely without oversight. That gap between deployment and accountability is the crux of his “guardrails” argument, and it’s why he’s pushed for what he calls an AI bill of rights, a measure the Florida Senate passed but the House allowed to stall.

A Rare Point of Bipartisan Agreement

What’s notable is how little daylight exists between DeSantis’s position and that of critics who rarely agree with him. Florida GOP chairman Evan Power accused local governments of “abusing our rights by using Flock cameras to build profiles and track citizens”, while Republican gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has called for an outright ban and defunding of Flock contracts, arguing the system creates risk for people who’ve committed no crime. Reporting has also tied Flock’s ALPR network to immigration enforcement, with one advocacy tracker citing more than 250 immigration-related searches run through the Florida Highway Patrol’s access to the system between March and May 2025. Nationally, the advocacy group DeFlock counts roughly 100 cities that have deactivated cameras or canceled contracts amid the same pattern of backlash, with at least 56 of those reversals occurring within a single year.