Flock-powered police chiefs stalking women shows why warrants are needed

An IPVM public report published on June 22, 2026 argues that the arrest of an Illinois police chief shows why courts should require warrants before officers query license plate reader data. The Holiday Hills chief, who also worked part-time for the Prairie Grove police, was arrested on June 18, 2026 and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony.

What prosecutors allege

Prosecutors said he used Prairie Grove's Flock license plate reader system and the Illinois State Police LEADS database to track six people he knew personally. Three were women he had been romantically involved with. He also tracked an ex-boyfriend of one of them, running that man's plate 140 times over several months; a protective order petition put the figure at 178 searches, 86 of them off duty.

In September 2025 the chief left a voicemail on the man's police phone, the petition says; the report quotes him saying it was the only time he was going to be nice about it. The misconduct spanned 18 months, from February 2024 to November 2025. A judge denied the protective order request in February 2026; the chief was arrested on a criminal warrant four months later.

A pattern Flock's own lawyer described

The report places the case in a documented pattern. The Institute for Justice, which is challenging Flock's system in court, counted at least 18 such cases nationwide as of mid-2026 and called the total almost certainly an undercount. A Jerome County, Idaho sheriff ran his wife's plate more than 700 times in three months, labelling each search a test; a Sedgwick, Kansas chief ran his ex-girlfriend's plate 164 times before resigning.

IPVM also cites a May 2026 radio interview in which Flock's chief legal officer, Dan Haley, said that very rarely someone does something stupid and uses the system to find an ex-girlfriend, adding that this is actually the most common thing. The report argues the two halves contradict each other, and that the company's claim that it tracks vehicles rather than people is undercut by its own executives.

Why warrants

Police chiefs write policy, supervise officers and enforce use agreements, the report notes, and are not junior officers who misunderstood the rules. It also notes that the ACLU, the EFF and the Institute for Justice support warrant-based use of plate readers rather than a ban.

The report rejects the argument that warrants would cost lives: the exigent circumstances exception already permits warrantless action in genuine emergencies, while a warrant rule would cover routine, passive searches of stored data.