Regulation 2026-08-20

A Florida officer ran his ex-wife's plate 717 times. A Kansas city has just switched its cameras off.

Christopher Goodson, 31, an officer with the Haines City police department in Florida, was arrested on 11 August and charged with official misconduct and an offence against users of computer systems. Investigators say he searched his estranged wife's licence plate in Flock Safety's camera database 717 times between 1 September 2024 and 30 June 2026, entering official-sounding reasons each time — narcotics, assault, fleeing and eluding, wanted persons — for a woman who was under no investigation and whose car was connected to no crime. He told a supervisor he had been checking where his children were when they were with their mother, and has indicated he intends to resign; his chief has ordered quarterly reviews of database access. Separately, in Gardner, Kansas, the city council voted on Monday 17 August not to renew the town's two Flock contracts. The police chief had already switched the four cameras off on 15 August after residents objected that the devices track ordinary people rather than criminals. Gardner had paid its roughly $13,000 up front and simply stopped using what it had bought. Flock itself announced new anti-abuse safeguards across its network on 14 August.

Why it mattersEarlier today we reported that Flock now sells an AI tool letting an officer search for a person by movement pattern alone, without a plate number, a name or an open case. This week supplies the other half of that story. The safeguard every city council has been told to rely on is that an officer must type a reason for each search — and 717 times, across 22 months, a reason was typed and nobody read it. Whatever a model layered on top of that database can infer, the access control underneath it is a text box. Gardner is four cameras and $13,000, which is nothing beside a network of more than 80,000; what makes it worth noticing is that the cancellation came from residents at a council meeting, not from a court or a legislature.

✓ Verified · 5 sources

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2026-08-20

A Florida officer ran his ex-wife's plate 717 times. A Kansas city has just switched its cameras off.

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