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Five Indianapolis officers charged with misconduct over improper Flock camera searches
Marion County prosecutors charged five Indianapolis officers with fraud and misconduct for using Flock cameras to track ex-partners and women met on patrol. The department's answer is a case-number rule for every search plus faster audits, both run by the agency itself.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Investigators found five Indianapolis officers used the department's Flock system to track people suspected of no crime, and prosecutors filed fraud and official misconduct charges on Wednesday.
- Four of the five officers were suspended and recommended for termination, according to a department statement on X, while the fifth, Abigail Cramer, resigned.
- A Washington Post investigation last month found at least fifty police officers had already been charged with using plate readers for illegal purposes, some for stalking.
- After the Post's report, Flock said it would roll out new measures designed to prevent misuse by police departments.
- Flock's CEO and executives from three other police-tech firms reportedly skipped a Wednesday Senate hearing on the network after Senator Josh Hawley invited them.
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Why it matters
- cost Catching misuse under the Indianapolis model means the department's own staff reviewing searches, so the agency's budget pays for policing its officers' lookups.
- exposure The officer at the keyboard now carries personal criminal risk for a private plate lookup, on top of any department discipline.
- decision Agencies renewing with Flock have to decide whether search-reason and audit requirements live in their own policy, as in Indianapolis, or get written into the vendor contract.
Jonathan Schultz, an eighteen-year veteran of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, faces two counts of stalking on top of the fraud and misconduct charges [2]. In one case, prosecutors found, he told a woman he was an FBI agent and started following her to the gym and other places, according to The Washington Post [3]. Abigail Cramer used Flock's system to retrieve information on relatives of her wife's ex-wife, the Post reported [5].
Flock pitches its tools as a way for departments to make faster, more informed decisions in the field [11]. Chief Tanya Terry described what her officers did with the system in other terms. "These individuals' actions went far beyond a clerical error or a violation of department policy," she said in a statement. "These actions crossed into criminal conduct and shook the foundation of trust that our agency is built upon." [7]
The department also said the conduct predates its new plate-reader policy [6]. That policy requires every search to be directly related to a particular case or incident number, plus what the department called "stronger auditing to more quickly identify and investigate potential misuse and ensure every search is for a legitimate law enforcement purpose" [6]. Gizmodo's report does not describe the measures Flock promised, and it does not show any agency writing audit terms into a Flock contract [9].
Flock reportedly ran more than 120,000 plate readers across the United States as of last month [10]. Add Wednesday's five to the Post's count and at least 55 officers have been charged over illegal plate-reader use [1]. So far, buyers are answering in two ways. Indianapolis kept its cameras and put rules around the search [6]. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered every Flock roadside camera out of the state by the end of the month [12].
The first check is whether a search requires a case or incident number before it returns anything. The second is whether someone other than the searcher reviews the log soon enough to catch a pattern.
Yes on both is what Indianapolis says it has now [6]. A required number with no reviewer collects whatever number the officer types. A reviewer with no required number can see who searched but has nothing to check the reason against. No required reason and slower audits is the department's own account of where it stood when the five officers ran their searches [6].
The check before a renewal is a sample: one week of searches, with a supervisor matching each one to a real case. An agency that cannot produce that list from the vendor's logs is where Indianapolis says it was before the new policy [6].
What to watch
- Whether the measures Flock promised enforce a case-number requirement inside the product or leave it to each department's policy.
- Whether Florida's Flock cameras actually come down by the governor's end-of-month deadline, and whether another state issues a similar order.
- Whether Flock's CEO agrees to appear before Hawley's subcommittee after missing Wednesday's hearing.