\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"Pinellas](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Screenshot-2026-10-12-123353.png\")
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri responds to questions about ALPR sponsorships at the Oct. 8, 2026, Pinellas County Commission meeting.
\nCredit: Pinellas County Government \/ Pinellas County Government<\/p>\n
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri is once again<\/a> moving the needle on nationwide policy, this time to promote one of the most controversial pieces of police tech this decade: Flock cameras.<\/p>\n Gualtieri leads the Major County Sheriffs of America<\/a> (MCSA) a group of sheriffs overseeing the nation\u2019s largest counties. This year, Gualtieri is spearheading a national campaign through MCSA\u00a0 promoting Flock-style cameras. That was the subject of some controversy at the latest Pinellas County Commission meeting.<\/p>\n Commisioners asked Gualtieri to come to its Oct. 8 meeting to answer their questions about automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which have received bipartisan backlash<\/a> over privacy, stalking and 4th Amendment concerns.<\/p>\n Gualtieri began with an eight-minute video produced by the Major County Sheriffs of America highlighting ALPR success stories. He said he\u2019s used the video \u201cacross the country\u201d to advocate for ALPRs, including in Washington D.C.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it is good background information, and it was produced in my capacity as the president of the Major County Sheriffs of America,\u201d Gualtieri told the commission.<\/p>\n The video highlighted an Alzheimer\u2019s patient returned to his family, a six-year-old whose kidnapper was caught, and a serial rapist put behind bars. All, according to the video, done with the help of ALPRs. The video ended with a \u201cmyth busting\u201d segment featuring Gualtieri himself.<\/p>\n Later in the meeting, Commissioner Vince Nowicki asked Gualtieri about MCSA sponsorships from three ALPR companies.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Major County Sheriffs of America \u2026 listed Flock, Axon and Motorola as major sponsors. Do you have any information on that?\u201d Nowicki asked, also noting that MCSA put out a wealth of information supporting ALPRs.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat you\u2019re insinuating\u2019s offensive, so don\u2019t even go there,\u201d replied a visibly-frustrated Gualtieri. \u201cI\u2019m not being bought and paid by anybody, and that\u2019s a bunch of B.S.\u201d<\/p>\n Nowicki said he wasn\u2019t trying to insinuate anything. Gualtieri didn\u2019t buy it, saying, \u201cYou knew exactly what you were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n Nowicki told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay he respects Gualtieri and believes the sheriff was exhausted after a long round of questioning. Still, he disagrees with the sheriff\u2019s argument that Flock cameras don\u2019t track people.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not physically tracking you, there\u2019s no tracking device, but it is collecting people\u2019s and vehicles\u2019 movements, and it\u2019s storing those movements in a chronological timestamped database to see where you go,\u201d Nowicki told CL.<\/p>\n Gualtieri says ALPRs have been in use for 20 years, prompting auditing concerns<\/p>\n Gualtieri reassured the commission that this wasn\u2019t new technology, and said his office had used ALPRs for 20 years<\/p>\n Commissioner Brian Scott was alarmed by this figure. He mentioned the deputy arrested last week for allegedly searching the sheriff\u2019s ALPR database 200 times for a love interest.<\/p>\n Scott noted that a media inquiry\u2014made by TCPalm reporter Jack Lemnus<\/a>\u2014was the reason for the audit. \u201cWe\u2019ve had these in place for 20 years. Have we been under-auditing for 20 years?\u201d<\/p>\n Gualtieri said that a review of the audit system was underway before saying that \u201cwe\u2019re not gonna catch everything.\u201d<\/p>\n ALPRs buy $450,000 worth of MCSA sponsorship<\/p>\n Flock, Motorola and Axon are each \u201csheriff level\u201d MCSA sponsors, according to MCSA\u2019s website<\/a>\u2014the highest sponsorship package the organization sells.<\/p>\n Each of the five available slots costs $150,000 <\/a>and comes with benefits including a speaking role at the conference, being featured in the organization\u2019s resource guide, and a \u201cquarterly content post on YouTube.\u201d<\/p>\n The pitch from MCSA to its corporate sponsors says buyers will \u201cform a powerful voice on issues of public concern in the law enforcement community.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThrough your partnership with MCSA you will build long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with our member Sheriffs and their team. With exclusive access to the Major County Sheriffs, you will have the opportunity to work together to achieve common goals of communication, education, advocacy and research, and become thought leaders in the industry,\u201d the pitch adds.<\/p>\n A YouTube page linked on the MCSA website seems to have been removed.<\/a><\/p>\n MCSA has a big banner on the front page of its website reading, \u201cALPR RESOURCES.\u201d It\u2019s also the very first option in the menu on the website.<\/p>\n That leads to a page with five documents and the eight-minute video, all explaining how useful ALPRs are in helping fight crime and that they are not 4th Amendment violations.<\/p>\n One document<\/a> features Gualtieri\u2019s headshot and his pro-ALPR message at the bottom. It also features the six-year-old from the video alongside her kidnapper\u2019s mugshot, and a quote from her that says, \u201cI feel good because he\u2019s in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n MCSA also signed a joint letter<\/a> opposing a bill amendment that would have prohibited agencies from receiving federal funds if they use ALPRs.<\/p>\n There are Constitutional concerns over the use of ALPRs<\/p>\n One of the \u201cmyths\u201d addressed in the video was the concern that ALPRs violate the 4th Amendment by invading one\u2019s reasonable expectation of privacy. \u201cFACT: Courts have ruled ordinary use of ALPR does not violate the constitution,\u201d the video says.<\/p>\n But last week\u2014after the video was made\u2014a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled<\/a> that an officer\u2019s use of an ALPR database was an unreasonable search. Evidence obtained through that search had to be thrown out\u2014including 91 pounds of meth.<\/p>\n The judge said that a solitary ALPR camera isn\u2019t unconstitutional, but a vast network of them can constitute an invasion of privacy.<\/p>\n The judge\u2019s opinion<\/a> reads:<\/p>\n \u201cThink about it this way. We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: \u2018Hey, I saw you out driving by the store last week.\u2019 But we do not expect people we know\u2014let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement\u2014to randomly approach us to say: \u2018Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too.\u2019<\/p>\n Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts.\u201d<\/p>\n Beryl Lipton investigates police surveillance tech for digital civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. She told CL that ALPRs do track people, contrary to Gualtieri\u2019s repeated claims that they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is the whole premise of the license plate reader system, right?\u201d she told CL. \u201cIf you have a car that is of interest\u2014maybe because it contains a kidnapped child, maybe because it contains your ex wife\u2014you will be able to find that vehicle more quickly using a license plate reader system.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo I don\u2019t know if we\u2019re just working on different definitions of \u2018track,\u2019 but license plate readers certainly can be used to track individuals or at least to get a very good idea of where they have been and at what time,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n Lipton said that the current goal of a lot of police tech is to figure out how to unify multiple datasets, including ALPR data and cell phone data that police purchase from digital ad brokers.<\/p>\n Another top-level MCSA sponsor\u2014controversial police software company Peregrine\u2014aims to do just that.<\/a><\/p>\n Lipton said an ordinary data point today could be a Constitutional privacy violation tomorrow as technology becomes more capable of uniting disparate datasets.<\/p>\n The federal judge who ruled against ALPR use in Oklahoma noted that she was required to consider that possibility.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is also no longer difficult to imagine law enforcement using a fleet of drones hovering over an entire city so they don\u2019t miss the movement of a single vehicle,\u201d her ruling reads. \u201cThis is not hypothetical catastrophizing. The Court \u2018must take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in development.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Commissioners said they want to have more conversations with Gualtieri about Flock before voting on the tech. DeFlock St. Pete<\/a> organizer Zach Schira previously told WMNF<\/a> that he believes advocates for civil liberties should be included in conversations like that, and that commissioners shouldn\u2019t rely exclusively on the opinion of the police when evaluating police tech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri responds to questions about ALPR sponsorships at the Oct. 8, 2026, Pinellas County…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":425764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[126962,30275,46978,1598,16665,30415,167459,596,167460,132,202,204,203,199,201,200,60127],"class_list":["post-425763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-civil-liberties","tag-civil-rights","tag-flock-cameras","tag-law-enforcement","tag-local-government","tag-news-and-public-affairs","tag-pinellas-board-of-county-commissioners","tag-pinellas-county","tag-pinellas-sheriff","tag-police","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-surveillance-cameras"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}