A screengrab from a Sept. 28, 2026 press conference led by Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. Credit: Pinellas Sheriff / YouTube
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office has arrested two deputies after identifying misuse of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The agency didn’t catch it until a Florida reporter started asking questions.
On Sept. 2, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri told reporters at a press conference there were no current investigations into abuse of the Flock database—one brand of ALPR—by deputies. Days earlier on Aug. 20, TCPalm reporter Jack Lemnus asked about an anomaly he found in publicly-accessible logs that show limited information about Flock camera searches by law enforcement officers.
On Sept. 21, PCSO told Lemnus that the anomaly was “related to ongoing investigations, and all queries were valid.”
In a press release Wednesday morning, PCSO said Gualtieri will hold a press conference this afternoon about the arrest of two deputies for “improperly accessing sheriff’s office systems.”
The sheriff’s office separately sent an email to Lemnus.
“As a result of your original inquiry and after further research into our additional ALPR vendors, we did identify a misuse,” the email reads.
Pinellas isn’t the first agency to arrest deputies after Lemnus’ queries.
Over the last several months, dozens of law enforcement officers have been arrested, fired, put on leave or placed under investigation after Lemnus probed publicly-accessible Flock search logs. Many of those officers are accused of using Flock cameras to stalk ex-lovers.
Lemnus and his colleagues reached out to police departments, alerting them of concerning patterns they found in the publicly-accessible data—which represent only a fraction of the audit logs police departments can access.
Many of the departments were surprised and had not previously caught the abuse.
Earlier this month, CL interviewed Lemnus about his investigation.
“Essentially, all of the agencies that we reached out to had no idea that this abuse was going on,” Lemnus told CL. “We ran our own data analysis and we found users that had kind of abnormal or suspicious search patterns, you know, searching a single plate hundreds or thousands of times within a year or so. That kind of fits that pattern of the officers who use it to surveil their ex-romantic partners.”
He said that there were two main mechanisms by which abuse in an agency can be caught: law enforcement agencies policing themselves, or external auditors like reporters reviewing logs that are publicly available.
Flock encourages organizations to make some of their audit logs public in the interest of transparency, but PCSO doesn’t do that. Lemnus said that this, combined with a new Flock policy that redacts officer names and license plates, makes it basically impossible to do more investigations like his.
Lemnus said he was alarmed to discover that these agencies hadn’t already caught the issues. “Our reporting has shown that in the past, these law enforcement agencies have not been capable of policing themselves when it comes to looking for abnormal or suspicious users,” Lemnus said.
No information about the officers was provided before Wednesday’s 1 p.m. press conference, which will be livestreamed by WTSP.
Pitch in to help make the Tampa Bay Journalism Project a success.
Subscribe to Creative Loafing newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | BlueSky
This article appears in Sept. 24 – 30, 2026.
Related