On Feb. 19, a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy reportedly hit 70 mph on a two-lane Florida Keys road, passing cars and nearly causing a head-on collision. He wasn’t chasing a suspect. According to arrest documents, he was tracking down a woman he’d catcalled weeks earlier on the Apple TV+ set of Bad Monkey. Deputy Lamar Eliseo Roman was arrested in March 2026 and subsequently fired after investigators said he turned standard law-enforcement surveillance tools into a personal stalking operation.
How the Surveillance Actually Worked
Roman allegedly chained together multiple police systems to locate a woman who never gave him permission to contact her.
The toolchain, according to investigators, was disturbingly efficient. Roman allegedly used DAVID and FCIC/NCIC — Florida law-enforcement databases — to pull the woman’s identity, vehicle information, and current photo. Investigators say he also retrieved her signature. He admitted he knew the access was improper. Then came the escalation: he reportedly entered her license plate into a hotlist on the Guardian automated license plate reader system. Any ALPR camera that caught her plate would ping him automatically — a feature designed to flag stolen vehicles and wanted suspects, not someone a deputy found attractive on a TV set.
Key details from the case:
- Roman met the woman while working off-duty security on the Bad Monkey production
- He whistled, catcalled, and pressured her for contact details — then allegedly kept searching after she didn’t reciprocate
- Databases accessed: DAVID and FCIC/NCIC, used to pull her identity, vehicle information, current photo, and signature
- He added her plate to a Guardian ALPR hotlist — a system built to flag stolen vehicles and wanted suspects
- The hotlist alert triggered the Feb. 19 pursuit at 70+ mph on a two-lane Keys road; Roman was arrested in March 2026 and subsequently fired
The databases gave him her identity. The ALPR hotlist gave him her location. The badge gave him the authority to pull her over.
The Broader Problem No One Wants to Address
Your plate is public, the cameras are everywhere, and you have no way of knowing who added you to a list.
ALPR systems are sold to departments as crime-fighting tools. Guardian’s own documentation emphasizes the technology doesn’t identify drivers or passengers — it matches plates against hotlists. Roman allegedly added a private citizen to that same list. That’s not a software bug. That’s an access-control failure wearing a uniform — part of a broader pattern of tech scandals that exploit systemic weaknesses to take advantage of ordinary people.
The woman told investigators she thought Roman was simply flirting or joking. She had no idea government systems were secretly tracking her movements. That gap between what victims know and what officers can access is exactly what audit logs and use-restriction policies are supposed to close. They didn’t here. Roman’s arrest may push agencies to tighten database permissions and ALPR hotlist oversight — though “may” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The tools Roman allegedly used are standard-issue at departments nationwide. The question this case forces isn’t whether ALPR technology works. It’s who’s watching the people who operate it.
