Adam Rouhiainen is on the Red Madison Editorial Board.
Throughout Milwaukee, dozens of solar-powered cameras mounted on the side of the road record the license plate numbers, make and model, and unique features of every vehicle that passes by it. The data from these automated license plate readers (ALPRs) is streamed to and stored by a private company, Flock Safety, who puts it into a searchable database, with access given to law enforcement agencies around the country. In March 2025, Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala got busy, searching the database 179 times over the next two months for just two different vehicles.
Meanwhile, possibly by chance, Officer Ayala’s girlfriend at the time looked up her license plate number on haveibeenflocked.com; what she found was that “J. Aya” searched the Flock database for her license plate number over 100 times. The reason listed for these searches? “Investigation.”
According to the criminal complaint charging him with Attempted Misconduct in Public Office, Ayala made 124 license plate searches on his girlfriend’s vehicle, and another 55 searches on his ex’s. Both victims filed restraining orders; Ayala’s now ex-girlfriend wrote, “I was horrified, disgusted, embarrassed and terrified.” The second victim wrote, “When Ayala was using the Flock system repeatedly to stalk me via MPD resources, I feared for my safety.”
Milwaukee Police Department’s investigation into Officer Ayala began only after one of his victims searched for their own license plate on an activist website.
On May 7 of this year, The Milwaukee Police Department presented ALPR auditing guidelines. Each license plate search, and each officer’s searches, will be tested on a monthly basis for statistical outliers. This new auditing system, reducing the number of officers who have access to the Flock database down from 370 to 100, and the national news of Ayala’s misuse of Flock, was not enough to deter a second Milwaukee police officer from misusing the technology. Milwaukee Police Department Chief of Staff Heather Hough revealed this second instance of Flock misuse at the May 7 Fire and Police Commission meeting, saying, “There is an investigation pending, but I cannot disclose any other information at this time.”
MPD Chief of Staff Heather Hough discloses that a second Milwaukee officer is being investigated for ALPR misuse
Ayala ended up pleading guilty to a Class A misdemeanor, never having to deal with felony stalking charges. Menasha Police Officer Cristian Morales was not so lucky. On January 7 of this year, the Appleton Police Department arrested Officer Morales for stalking, a Class I felony. Their press release lacks any details on what Morales actually did, but a criminal complaint says Morales used the Flock network to search for his now ex-girlfriend’s vehicle 5 times in October 2025. He listed the reason for his searches as “welfare.” Morales’s ex-girlfriend wrote “I am concerned for my personal safety” in a petition for a restraining order.
These Milwaukee and Menasha/Appleton incidents of police misuse of ALPRs were ultimately disclosed to the public in some form by the police departments themselves. The Kenosha County Sheriff Department has been much more silent about their ALPR misuse incident. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner show Kenosha County sheriff’s deputy Frank McGrath made 16 Flock searches on a vehicle owned by another deputy. Why? From the Examiner’s analysis of the records they obtained, “McGrath was apparently stalking another Kenosha County deputy whom he was dating.” McGrath was offered a severance package to resign; he has not been charged with a crime.
Security issues involving government use of intelligence to spy on a love interest are not a new concept; the NSA even coined the term LOVINT since at least 2013 to describe such issues occurring in their agency. How has Wisconsin prepared for the age of fast and efficient image detection?
Wisconsin has no statewide oversight on local police’s use of ALPRs. By default, Flock stores all collected data for 30 days. The previously mentioned cases of police misconduct show that this is not nearly a small enough window of time to prevent bad actors in the government from infringing on people’s privacy. In contrast, New Hampshire must delete all ALPR data within 3 minutes of collection if there is no investigation hit.
Over 200 police forces across Wisconsin have contracts with Flock; some have auditing guidelines, as we saw in Milwaukee, and some have no publicly stated policy at all.
One of those 200 used to be the Dane County Sheriff. Some time in late 2022, the Dane County Sheriff began a pilot program of 26 Flock cameras. The County Board officially approved $80,000 in funding for Flock ALPRs in 2023. After a dozen MADSA members and other privacy advocates showed up to the April 20, 2026 Board meeting to speak against Flock, County Board voted to end their Flock contract by May 1.
Victory was short lived, because on June 4, the County Board held a vote to reinstate the $80,000 for a different ALPR network. MADSA members showed up again to speak against police surveillance networks. Is the Dane County Board of Supervisors aware of the aforementioned ALPR security issues we’ve seen, just in Wisconsin? I spoke at the June 4 County Board Meeting to make sure they were, reading off each of the previous four Wisconsin love interest spying cases. I also argued that any ALPR network, not just Flock, could be abused by individual officers.
Dane County Supervisors speaking against ALPRs included MADSA member Aria Trucios and MADSA-endorsed Heidi Wegleitner. On the capitalist incentives that private surveillance companies have when working with law enforcement, Supervisor Trucios argued, “The profit motive necessarily will push companies to seek as much profit out of that as possible, and the best way to seek that profit is by finding ways to aggregate that data, even if you anonymize it, share it with other partners, sell it off to other partners.”
Speaking about basic privacy and potential Fourth Amendment violations, Trucios continues: “It would be feasible that a federal agency would step in and say actually this is a matter of national security that we have a dragnet ability to track anybody within the U.S. at any time… I don’t believe that we should be privatizing our way around the Fourth Amendment. I don’t think our citizens and residents should be paying to create this dragnet automated tracking system.” On how this type of technology is still untested in the U.S. court system, they add, “Would we want to be the institution that’s on the hook?”
Dane County Supervisors Trucios and Wegleitner explain the issues with ALPR networks
Supervisor Wegleitner spoke about overpolicing communities of color. “I think the amount of surveillance we have all around us over the last 40 years also coincides with mass incarceration in this country and real harm inflicted on black and brown communities… Instead of law enforcement reacting to criminal behavior based on individualized suspicion, we have massive data networks and predictive data tracking and technology being funneled to law enforcement to try to intervene, to more closely monitor, to further overpolice and surveil communities that have always, consistently been harmed by law enforcement activities, that have disproportionate contact with the criminal legal system, that are disproportionally sitting in our jail right now, in our prisons. This automatic license plate reader system takes us further down that path.” Hinting at the security lapses we’ve seen with Flock, Wegleitner argues, “We don’t have the capacity of this Board and our committees to ensure this won’t be used for harm… I don’t see how a system like this could not be used for harm.”
At this June 4 meeting, the Board voted 26 to 7 to restore the $80,000 to the Sheriff for a new ALPR system “with enhanced privacy, security, transparency, and data control safeguards.”
Meanwhile, Flock cameras are still active throughout the Madison Area. Even though Dane County will be using a new ALPR provider, and Madison Police have never had a contract with Flock, four Flock cameras are located on the Capitol square as contracted with the State, UW-Madison has several Flock cameras throughout campus strategically pointed at crowded roads, and Maple Bluff has about a dozen.
ALPRs have reached the attention of only one candidate in the Wisconsin Governor’s race. In her AI policy, Francesca Hong singles out Flock specifically, demanding an “open-source, independently audited, and not controlled by a private vendor with a financial interest in its continued use.” Add a narrow data retention window, and we might be getting somewhere. No other candidate for Governor has Flock, ALPRs, or police surveillance policies on their website. This is particularly telling for Milwaukee County Executive and gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, who has seemingly made no recent statements in regards to the current debate over Flock in Milwaukee.
Even if the Wisconsin state government fails to regulate the various police forces across the state, we have various tools for more direct action. The site haveibeenflocked.com was used by the Josue Ayala’s victim to start that investigation. An open records request by the Wisconsin Examiner uncovered the Kenosha County Sheriff Department’s lack of action regarding their deputy’s misuse of Flock. DSA chapters, privacy advocates, and abolitionist groups are speaking out against Flock, and Fitchburg, Monona, Verona, UW-Police, and Dane County have all ended or are in the process of ending their Flock contracts. Even though Flock has earned the majority of recent attention on ALPR misuse, any brand of ALPR network recording every vehicle passing by its cameras and storing it into a searchable database is poised for misuse and violates our basic privacy rights.
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