() — A police officer faces two criminal charges after being accused of using Flock cameras to track his estranged ex-wife over 700 times while on and off duty.
Christopher Goodson, an officer in Haines City in central Florida, was found to have looked up his ex-wife’s license plate number in the Flock database 717 times between Sept. 1, 2024, and June 30, 2026, according to an affidavit. Goodson told a supervisor he had looked up his ex-wife’s car to keep track of his children’s location.
Goodson has been charged with one count of offenses against users of computers and electronic devices, and one count of official misconduct, according to a Haines City Police Department news release.
The officer has indicated that he plans to resign due to the investigation, according to police.
Goodson’s arrest is part of a growing number of documented abuses of the Flock camera surveillance system by police.
A man in North Manchester, Indiana, who has repeatedly criticized his local government and the police at town council meetings, told the press that he noticed he was being frequently followed by police. “It started to be more than a coincidence; it kept happening more and more,” Bob Sklar told WWSB. “I didn’t understand why.”
He then realized that Flock cameras were being used to track him. Sklar said he is not aware of any legitimate reason he is being tracked.
Currently, there are over 116,000 such surveillance cameras, placed mostly at intersections in urban and suburban neighborhoods.
Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, supervisor Andy Parrish is fighting Flock camera surveillance locally and nationally through his online campaigns.
“People are being hurt. There are young women whose lives have been changed forever,” Parrish told . “We’ve got 80 women stalked and terrorized.”
He pointed out that the Flock cameras allow officers to search people by their characteristics as well as their license plate numbers, such as the color of the hair and whether they are wearing a ring.
The information collected by Flock cameras is owned not by government or law enforcement entities but by the manufacturer of the devices, meaning the data is not subject to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. This gives nameless government bureaucrats, law enforcement, Flock employees, and countless other agencies easy access to track a person’s life with no accountability or oversight.
The information can also be used in conjunction with facial recognition software that makes compiling information far more harrowing.
Parrish alleged during a County Council meeting on July 8 that 5,000 agencies used the Flock Data of Trempealeau County in one month.
