Frequent Flockers. Repeat searches prompt officer firings, arrests

Frequent Flockers. Repeat searches prompt officer firings, arrests.

Key points

• Billy and Heidi Taylor separated around November 2024 after 27 years together, Billy Taylor, an electrician his friends call "Sparky, " informed USA TODAY.
• In Dallas, Georgia, state investigators arrested a 911 director who searched more than 2, 500 times for cars belonging to her estranged husband and his new girlfriend.
• USA TODAY contacted the Dallas Police Department regarding Heidi Taylor's Flock activity on July 6.
• Police employee Heidi Taylor is accused of misusing Flock cameras to track her estranged husband and his partner in Dallas, Georgia.
• That tool, nevertheless, allows agencies to audit their officers' search activity only dating back to January 2026.

Frequent Flockers. Repeat searches prompt officer firings, arrests. Kenny Jacoby, Austin Fast, Jack Lemnus USA TODAY. USA Today report exposes flock camera misuse.

At least 19 police and sheriff's office employees in five states were arrested, fired, put on administrative leave or placed under investigation over the last two months for using Flock Safety's vast network of license plate reader cameras to track cars' locations for potentially improper or illegal purposes.

But it wasn't their police supervisors who spotted their irregular search activity. It was USA TODAY reporters.

In Sarasota, Florida, an officer who tracked an ex-girlfriend's car at least 335 times over two months was fired and arrested.

Meanwhile, the Lufkin Police Department in Texas suspended all Flock employ after Rangers arrested an officer who had repeatedly tracked seven license plates, one more than 3, 400 times. He is charged with at least 100 felonies.

In each of those cases and more than a dozen others, USA TODAY flagged their patterns of questionable searches before their own agencies did. Only after reporters contacted their employers did the agencies spring into action.

Their cases illustrate a dynamic that is playing out in communities nationwide. As Flock and other brands of automated license plate readers become ubiquitous in almost every state, numerous law enforcement agencies have done little to monitor how their own employees employ them.

Some of that work instead has fallen on journalists, activists and others concerned that anyone with access to the company's private camera networks can follow virtually any driver's movements with a query as effortless as a Google search.

Yet in direct response to increasing public scrutiny over abuse of its technology, Flock in December 2025 changed its systems to create officers' misuse exponentially more challenging for the public to unearth.

To reveal the officers' surveillance, USA TODAY analyzed more than 75 million searches of Flock license plate reader data spanning three-and-a-half years and more than 6, 300 agencies – a fraction of the total number of searches by Flock users during that period.

While justifying plenty of of their searches with vague or nonsensical reasons, such as "SUS, " "TRAFFIC, " "INQUIRY, " "INVESTIGATION, " "TEST, " or a single letter of the alphabet, like "A, " "B" or "Z." Where reporters could determine the targeted cars' owners, they identified a number of registered to the searching officers' ex-partners, co-workers, family members and other residents they knew personally, the analysis identified hundreds of examples of law enforcement personnel searching single license plates hundreds or even thousands of times over prolonged periods.

Altogether, USA TODAY's analysis surfaced 240 Flock users whose frequent and persistent searches stood out from more casual users. Reporters contacted the police agencies that employed 67 of them. In regarding half those cases, the agencies confirmed or rolled out investigations for potential misuse. The agencies did not respond in a quarter of the cases. For the other quarter, the agencies remarked they lacked sufficient information or the uses appeared legitimate. Flock blacks out key data.

USA TODAY's analysis was feasible as until December, Flock customers could access monthly usage audits that indicated the initials of each person who searched the company's camera data, the tags they had searched and their stated reasons for searching. In plenty of states, those audits are public records that provide transparency into how officers apply the system.

But Flock changed its software in December to black out most officer initials, license plate numbers and reasons from those logs. It will create large-scale analyses like USA TODAY's virtually impossible going forward.

Flock declined to answer detailed questions from USA TODAY, providing only an emailed statement.

"Any officer abuse of our system is completely unacceptable, and the people that abuse our system should absolutely be held accountable, " remarked the statement from Paris Lewbell, Flock's public relations manager. "We are committed to setting a baseline for where safeguards and transparency for our industry should be, and welcome further conversations and regulations from local communities about the rules of the road that they want to set for public safety technology."

According to Lewbell, flock began redacting key details from audit logs as of a "pattern of people using publicly released audit data to identify undercover officers by name – publishing their contact information alongside details of active investigations." When pressed by USA TODAY for specific examples, Flock did not provide any.

Against the backdrop of a spate of headlines and police-officer arrests over abuse of its technology, Flock in January rolled out a new tool that helps their customers – thousands of police agencies, homeowners associations and private businesses – flag individuals who abuse the system.

In practice, the firm states the feature will detect officers' abnormal search activity and shut off their access until an agency administrator can review it. Furthermore, Flock began requiring users to enter specific case numbers and offense types associated with each search.

That tool, nevertheless, allows agencies to audit their officers' search activity only dating back to January 2026. And Flock won't require agencies to adopt it until next year.

Those limitations were on display in a case in Covington, Georgia, where police in July fired a detective after discovering with the support of Flock's tool that he had tracked a female co-worker 41 times since January, an internal affairs report indicates. The woman was shocked to learn from a USA TODAY reporter weeks afterwards, even so, the full extent of the detective's surveillance of her car: 2, 890 searches over more than two years.

Asked why the public should trust internal auditing as an adequate replacement for public oversight, given that plenty of agencies allowed their own officers' conduct to go unchecked for years, Flock did not respond.

Flock's redactions are "catastrophic" both for transparency and agencies' ability to spot improper searches by outside officers, remarked Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit whose mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and civil liberties.

"Flock encourages agencies to share their data nationwide, and now it's making it impossible for agencies to audit their data when it comes from an external entity, " he remarked. "Flock is doing it solely to cover its butt. It wants to cut down on the reporting regarding abusive searches."

For context, the change reflects the stance that Flock chief communications officer Joshua Thomas took one year ago in response to reservations concerning officers abusing its technology. "It is not Flock's job, " he remarked, "to police the police." 'It's an invasion of privacy'.

Flock's recent reforms offered little solace to Billy Taylor and Leandra Higgenbottom, whose cars Heidi Taylor is accused of improperly tracking for months while she was the 911 director for the police department in Dallas, Georgia.

Billy and Heidi Taylor separated around November 2024 after 27 years together, Billy Taylor, an electrician his friends call "Sparky, " informed USA TODAY. When he fixed the wiring in her home, he and Higgenbottom began dating shortly after.

In the months after, they remarked Heidi Taylor repeatedly demonstrated up unannounced at the restaurants where they ate, the hospital where Higgenbottom works and even at the rural, 100-acre Alabama property they regularly visit.

"Sometimes she would just sit there, and as we would walk out to her, then she'd haul buggy and be gone, " Higgenbottom remarked. "I think she wanted us to know she was there."

Heidi Taylor did not respond to calls or emails seeking comment. Billy Taylor remarked they had a brief discussion when she called him from jail to ask for her son's phone number. When he asked her why she tracked him and Higgenbottom, she replied: "You know why.", according to him.

USA TODAY's analysis demonstrates that Heidi Taylor employed Flock to look up Billy Taylor's and Higgenbottom's license plates almost every day from July 2024 to May 2025 – as plenty of as 39 times in one day, sometimes just seconds apart. More than half her searches of those cars occurred between 7 p.m. And 3 a.m.

USA TODAY contacted the Dallas Police Department regarding Heidi Taylor's Flock activity on July 6. A subsequent press release demonstrates the department asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to investigate her the next day.

Arrested on Aug. 12 on two misdemeanor counts of misusing a license plate reader, Heidi Taylor has not been charged in court. A 14-year department veteran who no longer works for the agency, she had garnered praise in performance evaluations, her personnel file demonstrates, for running background checks without being asked.

Billy Taylor and Higgenbottom dislike Flock, they informed USA TODAY, and the enormous power it places in the hands of residents like Heidi Taylor. This person is not a sworn officer. They live quiet lives and don't want to be tracked wherever they go.

Higgenbottom remarked she fears for her safety. She filed a petition for a restraining order against Heidi Taylor on Aug. 20, court records show, citing her frequent Flock searches.

It's an invasion of privacy, Billy Taylor remarked. Who offered y'all permission to look for me while I was going down the road? I'm not a wanted fugitive. I'm not a child molester. I'm not a thief. Why were y'all looking at me? Flurry of arrests, firings and investigations.

Almost immediately after USA TODAY reporters asked regarding their officers' irregular Flock usage, at least a dozen law enforcement agencies rolled out internal investigations.

Although some agencies remarked the officers' Flock searches appeared to be connected to legitimate narcotics investigations or training exercises, numerous took swift disciplinary action. Over the next few days, police officers, sheriff's deputies and law enforcement personnel nationwide were arrested, referred to outside agencies for criminal investigations, placed on leave or fired.

For now, frequent Flockers. Repeat searches prompt officer firings, arrests remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.