US Police Officers Allegedly Misused License Plate Cameras for Private Surveillance

Washington – 05 August 2026: At least 28 US police officers are alleged to have used their official access to automated license plate reader systems to monitor partners, former partners, or other people in their private circles. This emerges from an investigation by the Institute for Justice, reported on by Franceinfo on 4 August. The systems record license plates as well as the location and time of an image capture; law enforcement agencies can search this data for investigations.

According to the Institute for Justice, most of the documented cases have become public since 2024. The organization relies on media reports and accessible records. The accused are alleged to have queried location data without an official reason, thereby tracking the movements of individual people. However, the 28 cases do not constitute an official overall statistic for all police departments in the United States. The actual scale cannot be determined from them.

One case concerns Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Police officer Josue Ayala was investigated following a complaint alleging official misconduct. He is alleged to have used his department’s camera network to locate a woman with whom he was in a relationship, as well as her former partner. According to publicly known records, nearly 180 searches were carried out within two months.

Similar allegations were made in Orange City, Florida, against former police officer Jarmarus Brown. He is alleged to have queried the license plates of his then former partner and her relatives more than a hundred times. In Costa Mesa, California, former officer Robert Jay Josett pleaded guilty to using police databases and a license plate reader system to track private contacts. The cases differ in their legal assessment, but reveal a shared oversight risk: technically legitimate access rights can be misused for personal purposes.

Automated license plate reader systems are used, among other things, to find stolen vehicles, search for missing persons, or support criminal investigations. Cameras capture passing vehicles and store location and time information derived from them. If used unlawfully, this information can be used to create movement profiles. Many departments explicitly prohibit private searches and permit queries only with an official justification.

Provider Flock Safety states that every query is assigned to an individual user account and permanently logged. Such logs can facilitate internal investigations and criminal proceedings, but do not necessarily prevent abuse. In July 2026, the company said it introduced additional technical safeguards after interagency access to license plate data came under criticism. The cases now documented therefore also raise the question of how consistently departments review access and pursue rule violations.