LA Deputy Fired After Using Flock 3,000 Times To Track His Ex

There has been a lot of discussion over the new automatic license plate readers (ALPR's) like the brand Flock has created to help police departments track criminals from their crimes to their hiding places. The worry is that they could potentially be misused, like this officer who got fired after some gross misuse of the system.

Sheriff Joe Lopnito of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office told WWLTV that there is an deputy no longer with the office, after being busted using Flock to check his ex-fiancé's location more than 3,000 times over the course of a couple of years.

On Wednesday, a media outlet apparently contacted the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office after seeing on a watchdog website that a deputy had looked up the same license plate 3,000 times.

Sheriff Lopnito looked into the issue, and had the deputy, Nathan Rome, tell him that the ex-fiancé was aware of the tracking. When Sheriff Lopnito talked with the woman, she said that she was aware.

She didn't want to file charges, and said that Rome never showed up to where she was when he tracked her location.

Sheriff Lopnito said that the auditing software for the Flock cameras don't pick up those types of misues very well, but had the woman filed a complaint, they would've taken action.

“Without that type of formal complaint coming in, it is not easily recognizable within their program," he said.

What Is An ALPR?

They're called ALPRs: Automated License Plate Readers. The most well-known brand to people is from the company Flock Safety.

How ALPRs Work

ALPRs are AI-powered, capturing and analyzing all passing vehicles, storing details like a car's location, date, and time. The cameras capture details like make, model, color and even identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers.

Nationwide, the cameras collect data from millions of vehicles, explained as a tool to help fight crime. If a vehicle is described to law enforcement, they can put those details into their database.

A description like "It was a white car with a Cubs bumper sticker on the right side of the back window, I saw it around 3:30pm on Wednesday, July 18th" can turn up results that not only show the path the vehicle took, but any previous or future drives past the cameras that the vehicle took.

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The use of ALPRs is a fairly new technology being deployed across the country, but it comes with controversy.

There are those who are in favor of the technology, or at least indifferent - and there are those who don't support the idea of themselves being tracked constantly around their hometown, whether they're a criminal or not.

According to the website DeFlock.org, there are currently 124,683 known ALPRs mapped in the country through their site.