A Pinellas County Sheriff vehicle Credit: pinellassheriff / Facebook
Pinellas deputy Karl Gwynne was arrested Wednesday morning after allegedly querying an automated license plate reader (ALPR) database around 300 times searching for a romantic interest.
Another deputy was also arrested today for using Pinellas County Sheriff Office (PCSO) databases to look for information connected to a juvenile he was romantically interested in.
Gwynne—who’s served the county since 2005—allegedly searched using a tool designed by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office that searches across all ALPR brands the agency uses, including Flock. That tool obscures the name of the deputy who made the search to everyone except the sheriff’s office.
PCSO did not know about the searches until TCPalm reporter Jack Lemnus sent a query asking about an anomaly in the database.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced the arrest at a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
Gualtieri told reporters that Gwynne, 57, searched for a 35-year-old woman he arrested in 2010. In 2024, Gwynne contacted the woman over social media, according to the sheriff.
Between January 2025-July 2026, Gwynne allegedly searched for the woman’s license plate in the ALPR database around 300 times, sometimes outside of work hours.
Gualtieri said that when confronted, Gwynne initially said the searches were for official reasons. After about 30 minutes, he allegedly confessed that he was pursuing a romantic relationship with the woman, who had rejected his advances. He reportedly resigned on the spot.
Gwynne has been charged with four counts of unlawfully accessing a computer system and one count of official misconduct.
Gualtieri said at a press conference earlier this month that ALPRs cannot track people. When Creative Loafing Tampa Bay asked at today’s press conference why Gwynne was interested in the ALPR results, Gualtieri said he was simply interested in pictures of the back of the woman’s car.
The sheriff said that this revealed that their current audit system was “inadequate.” He said that PCSO would eventually discontinue use of their current in-house ALPR search tool for unrelated technical reasons.
Gwynne wasn’t the only PCSO deputy looking for love and poking around in the agency’s databases.
At today’s press conference, Gualtieri also shared news about the arrest of Deputy Travis Stanton. On Aug. 26 of this year, according to a press release from PCSO, a juvenile female victim made an online complaint against Stanton who visited her workplace at least nine times between July 28-Sept. 17.
Stanton, who was hired by PCSO in 2017, spoke to her regarding her suspended license and other miscellaneous topics, and ran the victim and the victim’s family through multiple databases to find out more information about them.
In interviews, PSCO investigators learned that “Stanton was interested in the victim in a romantic way and called her his “queen” even though the attention was not
reciprocated.”
He also resigned while under PSCO investigation and has been charged with
one count of of Access Computer Electronic Device Without Authority and one count of Official Misconduct.
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UPDATED 09/30/26 6:13 p.m. Updated with video from today’s press conference and details on the arrest of a second PCSO deputy.
This article appears in Oct. 01 – 07, 2026.
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