By Ghost Zero

On June 25, 2026, the Richmond County Sheriff's Office in Georgia ran a routine audit of its Flock searches. That audit led to the arrest of a deputy. By mid-October, seven sheriff's office employees had been arrested on charges tied to misusing the plate reader system, and the first six had been fired.

How did it happen? The sheriff explained it himself. Deputies needed no supervisor approval to search the system. "They could just enter it," he told WRDW. About 330 deputies had access to nearly 200 cameras.

Give that department credit for one thing: somebody ran the audit. In most of the country, nobody does.

This is Part 3 of The Warrantless Road. It is written for the honest officers, and there are a lot of them, who are tired of being blamed for a system that makes this kind of abuse easy.

The Cases

Every person below is named exactly as the record names them: charged, pleaded guilty or disciplined. Charges are allegations until a court decides.

– Sedgwick, Kansas. Police Chief Lee Nygaard ran his ex-girlfriend's plate 164 times and her boyfriend's 64 times. The state revoked his police certification. He was not criminally charged.
– Kechi, Kansas. Lieutenant Victor Heiar used Wichita's Flock system to track his estranged wife. He pleaded guilty to stalking and a computer crime in 2023.
– Orange City, Florida. Officer Jarmarus Brown was arrested on stalking and unauthorized-access charges after a woman went to police. An audit then found 108 searches of her plate and her parents' plates over seven months.
– Milwaukee. Officer Josue Ayala searched two people 179 times for personal reasons. The victim found out using a public tool called Have I Been Flocked. He pleaded guilty to attempted misconduct in public office.
– Milwaukee again. Detective Tehrangi Chapman is charged over searches of two people, with reasons logged as "test" and "training." Chapman was fired and has pleaded not guilty. Milwaukee renewed its Flock contract anyway.
– Albany, Georgia. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested five former officers for misuse of plate data after the department's own audit. The chief added weekly audits.
– Illinois. A former Joliet lieutenant and a former Holiday Hills police chief face felony charges. Part 5 has the details.

The Institute for Justice has tracked dozens of cases of police using plate readers to stalk romantic interests. Its finding should stop every chief cold: only a few were caught by internal investigations. Most came to light only after victims reported them.

The Reasons Typed in the Box

Flock's defense is the audit trail. Every search requires a reason, and every reason is logged forever. Here is what those logs actually show.

– Senator Ron Wyden's office reported that more than 14% of 11.4 million Flock searches it reviewed listed nothing but "investigation" as the reason.
– The Electronic Frontier Foundation found officers logging reasons like "LOL," "LMAO" and "idk," and more than 6,300 searches marked simply "TBD."
– In the Spokane, Washington area, more than 289,000 searches had no case number, even though local policy required one. Flock did not block them.
– The ACLU quoted a Flock spokesman saying: "it is not Flock's job to police the police."

And then there are the reasons that are not jokes.

In 2025, a Johnson County, Texas sheriff's office ran a nationwide search that reached 83,345 cameras. The reason logged: "had an abortion, search for female."

EFF found officers at more than 80 agencies typing ethnic terms for Romani people as search reasons, including the Lake County, Illinois Sheriff's Office.

In New Hanover County, North Carolina, audit logs released in June 2026 show someone using Flock's FreeForm AI to search for people with prompts like "2 young teenage black males." The system blocked those searches. Each one was re-run seconds later with the race term removed and allowed through. The searching agencies are redacted.

So, can Flock search by race? Here is the straight answer for any officer who asks. No built-in race filter has been documented, and Flock says its products do not identify race. But officers typing race and ethnic terms into the system is documented, in the logs, more than once. The filter is not the problem. The open text box is.

New Hanover County ended its Flock contract in September 2026 by a 4-0 vote. One commissioner put it plainly: "I don't believe that sufficient guardrails are in place."

What Honest Officers Already Know

Look at how the abusers got caught. Richmond County: a routine audit. Albany: the department's own audit. Orange City: an audit after a victim came forward. When someone actually checks, the system catches its own. The trouble is that checking is optional, and the company that sells the tool says policing it is not its job.

After the arrests, the Richmond County sheriff changed the rules. Every search now needs a case number, the reason for the call and the officer's badge number, and fewer people have access. That is what it took: six arrests first.

Every officer who abuses this system makes every honest officer's job harder. They burn public trust that good deputies spend years building. An honest cop has nothing to fear from audits. The only people who benefit from a system nobody checks are the ones abusing it.

My opinion, labeled as my opinion: a tool that lets one officer quietly track an ex across a nationwide grid, and depends on the victim to catch it, should not exist in a free country. I do not consent to this database watching my family, and I do not believe any amount of auditing makes it right. Take the cameras down.

What You Can Do

The goal is removal.

– Tell your city council and county board in writing: I do not consent. End the Flock contract and take the cameras down.
– File a public records request for your department's Flock audit log: every search, the reason typed and the officer's ID. Bring the worst reasons to public comment and read them out loud.
– Check your own plate on Have I Been Flocked. That is how the Milwaukee victim found out.

If your town will not take them down yet, demand the fallback in writing while you keep pushing:

– Supervisor approval and a real case number for every search, enforced by the system, not by the honor code.
– Monthly audits, published to the public, with every misuse referred to prosecutors.
– No free-text people searches. No race, ethnicity or medical terms in any search, ever.

Safeguards are the floor, not the goal.

Start today. Search your city council's records for the words "Flock" or "license plate reader" and find out when the contract renews.

The full research is in The Flock Files: How a $7.5 Billion Startup Built America’s Surveillance Grid – and How We Stop It, free in the Red Pill Library. Part 1 of The Warrantless Road covers who built the network, who is watching through it and how exposed it is, Part 2 covers what happens when the machine is wrong, Part 4 covers the way out, and Part 5 covers Illinois. I also put this subject into song form, released by Vigilant Protocol as FLOCKED and by The Valkyrie Project as SMILE, with songs from Redline Republic and Axiom 312 on the way. Protocol Media is building an archive for every topic it covers: books, briefs, music, art and short-form video, backed by the Evidence, Founding and Acts Records. The work is underway and the documents are still being added, so the page keeps growing.

ART AS THE WEAPON. TRUTH AS THE AMMUNITION.