Navy veteran Napoleon Jones filmed a traffic stop from a private parking lot in Sussex, Wisconsin on May 4, 2025. He wasn’t interfering. He stayed back, kept his phone up, and exercised a right courts have affirmed repeatedly. Within hours, he was in handcuffs. Within weeks, his license plate had been queried in Flock Safety‘s surveillance system over 100 times by the very department that arrested him.
Here’s what the records show:
- Jones was arrested on “resisting and obstructing” charges, held five hours, then released with zero citations or criminal charges
- According to Reason, an internal memo confirmed Deputy Brandon Shayhorn’s own supervisor told him the stop was illegal shortly after it occurred
- After Jones filed a citizen’s complaint, Flock searches on his white BMW exceeded 100 — some run by Shayhorn himself
- Deputies testified the searches were ordered by a lieutenant “in connection with” the complaint, yet Jones faced no charges and no active criminal investigation at the time
- Waukesha County’s own Flock policy explicitly prohibits data use except for “legitimate law enforcement purposes”
Flock Safety’s system is straightforward: fixed cameras photograph passing vehicles, extract plate number, make, model, timestamp, and location, then store everything in a searchable cloud database. Every query gets logged. That audit trail sounds like accountability — but it functions more like a dashcam that only matters after the crash, recording everything while protecting no one in real time. There’s no automated flag when the same officer who arrested someone queries that person’s plate a hundred times in a month. Jones told TMJ4, via Reason’s reporting: “I couldn’t understand why or how that would even be a possibility… because from my understanding, it’s for criminal stuff.”
Wisconsin Is the Pattern, Not the Exception
Jones’s case is emerging as part of a documented national trend of ALPR misuse that audit logs catch only after the damage is done.
Jones isn’t an outlier. USA TODAY identified at least 19 officers nationally punished for Flock misuse, including one who queried a single plate 3,400 times. The ACLU of Wisconsin flagged Milwaukee officers facing criminal charges for tracking individuals nearly 200 times — and roughly 20 times in another case — for explicitly personal reasons. Dane County’s board voted in April 2026 to pull $80,000 in Flock funding, citing privacy and oversight failures. The same story keeps surfacing across facial recognition, geolocation warrants, and every other “smart policing” tool: audit logs document abuse. They don’t prevent it.
Jones amended his federal complaint in July 2026 to include officers who ran the Flock queries without lawful justification. For anyone who has ever filmed a police interaction from a public or private space, the implication is clear — and deliberate. The chilling effect is the whole point. A broader pattern of secretly tracking users by government actors underscores just how systemic these surveillance abuses have become.
