Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed (Public Report)Javascript is disabled. Enable javascript to view IPVM.<br>Contact us at info@ipvm.com for help.

Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed<br>IT

IPVM Team<br>•Published Jun 22, 2026 17:05 PM

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While Flock claims its system tracks vehicles, not people, the documented record of police chiefs stalking ex-partners through Flock shows otherwise. When the most experienced, highest-ranking officers in law enforcement, the people most responsible for enforcing the rules, demonstrate ongoing abuses, the answer is the same courts have given for each generation of powerful tracking technology: require a warrant first.

The police chief of Holiday Hills, Illinois, and a part-time officer at Prairie Grove Police Department, was arrested June 18, 2026, and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony.

Prosecutors alleged 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 of those people were women the chief had been in romantic relationships with, according to prosecutors at his arraignment. He also tracked an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, running that man's plate 140 times over several months, a figure the protective order petition put at 178, with 86 of those searches conducted while off duty.

In September 2025, the chief called the man and left a voicemail on his police phone, per a petition for a no-contact order the man later filed:

This is the only time I'm going to be nice about this.

The misconduct spanned 18 months, from February 26, 2024, to November 5, 2025. A judge denied the man's protective order petition in February 2026. The chief was arrested on a criminal warrant four months later, still listed as the Holiday Hills police official. The village said it was "surprised" by the charges.

A Pattern Flock's CLO Acknowledged

The chief's arrest extends a documented pattern of Flock LPR being used by law enforcement to track romantic partners and rivals. The Institute for Justice, pursuing a constitutional challenge to Flock's system, counted at least 18 such cases nationwide as of mid-2026, describing the total as "almost certainly an undercount."

Among the highest-profile recent cases: Braselton, Georgia police chief was arrested in November 2025 following a GBI audit log review, after the abuse had already occurred, not before. A Jerome County, Idaho, Sheriff ran his wife's plate more than 700 times in three months, labeling each search "test," before retiring. Sedgwick, Kansas police chief ran his ex-girlfriend's plate 164 times and her new boyfriend's 64 times before resigning.

The same pattern appears at lower ranks. A Milwaukee officer tracked a partner and her ex over 100 times, with the abuse surfacing through a third-party website after months of undetected access. A Costa Mesa, California officer continued accessing Flock to locate his mistress after being placed on administrative leave.

In a May 2026 radio appearance on Maine's Morning News, IPVM found Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley making an offhand admission that cuts against the company's standard deflections:

Very rarely, someone does something stupid. They use it to figure out where an ex-girlfriend is or something like that. That's actually the most common thing.

He characterizes the behavior as rare. He simultaneously identifies it as the most common form of abuse. The tension between those two statements is the problem Flock has left unaddressed.

Chiefs Show Flock Tracks People

Flock's public position, stated by Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas in a company video on its Trust page, is that the system tracks vehicles exclusively: "There's a common misconception that Flock tracks you wherever you go, and that's just not the case."

The chief-level cases demonstrate what that framing conceals. A chief running a romantic rival's plate 140 times is tracking a person. The vehicle is the mechanism. The person is the target. That is the purpose of the search, and the documented cases confirm it at every rank.

Flock's own CLO confirmed the connection. In a video on the same Trust page, Haley stated that license plates "are required specifically to correlate to ownership of that vehicle." A plate read is, by legal design, a record tied to a specific person. As IPVM analyzed in "Flock Tracks You": Execs Contradiction Reveals Reality, the two executives' statements, placed side by side, dismantle the company's own tracking denial.

The rank of those involved matters beyond the individual cases. Police chiefs set policy, supervise officers, enforce use agreements, and bear responsibility for compliance. They are also among the most experienced people in law enforcement, late in their careers, with decades of training....