A Cop Used License Plate Data To Track An Abuse Victim For Her Alleged Abuser — And Walked Away Without Charges

The System Caught The Misuse. It Just Couldn’t Punish It

I try to keep this blog focused on the fun side of cars — the concepts, the reveals, the things worth getting excited about. But every so often a story comes through the feed that’s about cars only in the sense that it involves the technology now bolted to intersections everywhere, and it’s worth pausing on. This is one of those.

San Jose’s police chief disclosed that an officer used the department’s Flock automated license plate reader database to track a woman on behalf of his cousin — the same man she had accused of domestic violence. The officer shared what he found. He was fired in April after a roughly year-long investigation. He was not criminally charged. Neither was his cousin.

How It Actually Unraveled

The investigation started because the woman noticed her alleged abuser seemed to know where she was, and had the presence of mind to connect that to the fact his cousin was a police officer. That’s not a coincidence catching this — that’s a person paying close attention to a genuinely frightening pattern and reporting it. The department checked the Flock audit logs, found unauthorized access tied to the officer’s personal phone, and the case built from there.

To the department’s credit, the audit trail did what it was supposed to do. The access left a record, the record was checked, and the officer lost his badge. That part of the system worked.

The Part That Didn’t Work

Here’s where it gets genuinely frustrating: California’s laws criminalizing improper access to confidential criminal databases apparently don’t clearly extend to ALPR data the same way. That’s not a minor technicality — it’s the difference between “this officer committed a crime” and “this officer violated department policy.” Chief Paul Joseph is now asking lawmakers to close that gap and expressly criminalize unauthorized access and disclosure of this kind of data.

There’s also an uncomfortable detail buried in the reporting: nobody has confirmed whether the officer lost his Peace Officer Certification. Getting fired from one department doesn’t necessarily stop someone from getting hired at another, particularly if the underlying conduct was never formally criminalized.

Why This Matters Beyond One Case

Automated license plate readers are everywhere now, and the pitch for them has always leaned on the promise of oversight — audit logs, access controls, accountability if something goes wrong. This case shows that infrastructure can technically function exactly as designed and still leave the person being tracked without any real legal protection, because the underlying criminal statutes haven’t caught up to what these systems can actually do.

My Take

I don’t think the answer here is to abandon ALPR technology — it genuinely does solve real crimes. But a system that can catch misuse after the fact isn’t the same as a system that prevents it, or one that guarantees consequences when it happens. If the tracking data these networks generate can be weaponized against the very people they’re supposed to protect, closing the legal gap Chief Joseph is describing shouldn’t be optional. It should be the baseline before any more of these cameras go up.

This is a heavier one than I usually cover here, but if you or someone you know is dealing with domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) is available 24/7.