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Title: Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in
Indianapolis

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/04332...

"Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with
or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes,"
reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations "based on
thousands of pages of police and court records," which found that "In many of
these cases, officers used Flock's roadside cameras to track the location of
romantic partners and exes." In fact, five Indianapolis police officers were
just criminally charged Wednesday with fraud and misconduct. "One has also
been charged with stalking," the police department said in a statement,
noting that one office had already resigned, "while the four other officers
have been suspended and recommended for termination. County prosecutor Ryan
Mears admitted "A lot of this was initiated by The Washington Post." And the
Post published a new investigation Wednesday: Using publicly available
information, The Post found that...one of the officers charged Wednesday,
appeared to have relied on Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife
and two close personal acquaintances, searching the plates 3,759 times over a
10-month period - an average of about 12 lookups per day. At the time, Police
Chief Tanya Terry said she suspended one officer while the department
conducted an investigation into possible misuse and a systemwide audit of the
city's 301-camera Flock system. That audit led to the discovery of more
widespread abuse, [County prosecutor Ryan] Mears said Wednesday. Mears said
the department's findings highlight the vast power Flock cameras give police
officers and raise questions about whether the government should be doing
more to prevent the misuse of that power. "Many of the proposed guardrails
and the things that have been proposed would not have prevented the behaviors
and actions we see here today," Mears said. "Does there need to be
independent oversight? Does there need to be judicial oversight of the Flock
camera system?" One of the Indianapolis officers, Schultz, an 18-year veteran
of the police department, was accused of using Flock to track his ex-wife and
women he met while on duty or out in public. He was charged with multiple
counts of official misconduct as well as two counts of stalking. Schultz told
one woman he was an FBI agent, according to prosecutors, and began texting
her and showing up at places she frequented, including at her gym and at a
school function with her daughter. Prosecutors said he arrived at her gym
within an hour of her at least nine times between June 12 and Aug. 1 of this
year... Another woman met Schultz after her car was stolen from a mall
parking lot, and he began texting her flirty messages later that night. The
two dated briefly, and Schultz later looked up where the woman went on dates
with another man. Schultz searched the plates of a third woman 178 times and
also frequently showed up where she was, including her gym, a Smoothie King
and a Walmart earlier this month... A third officer, Binford, told
investigators he had used the log-in credentials of another officer who had
logged in to Binford's laptop during a field training exercise. Binford
searched the plate of his ex-wife more than 1,000 times between April 2024
and April 2025. Indianapolis police had no regular practice of auditing
officers' Flock searches until recently, [Police Chief] Terry said in an
interview last month. The department's investigation into the tool's misuse
has been "a learning process for us," she said at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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