* Two more suburban police departments have disclosed alleged license plate reader misuse this month. First, Waukegan…

Waukegan police and the Lake County State’s Attorney announced Tuesday that Oscar Magpali is facing five counts of official misconduct.

Magpali has been a department employee for 11 years, officials said.

Officials said they first identified “numerous” searches of vehicles registered to Waukegan Police Department Employees and people associated with those employees. As they investigated those searches, WPD said an administrative and a criminal investigation were launched separately.

Their investigation of electronic and departmental records, as well as witness interviews, led them to examine activity in the Illinois Law Enforcement Agencies Data System, or LEADS, and the National Crime Information Center. As a result of that investigation, five official misconduct charges were filed against Magpali.

Police said a department-wide administrative investigation and audit into officers’ use of law enforcement databases remains ongoing.

* And Warrenville…

A Warrenville Police officer is under investigation for allegedly using the department’s Flock license plate reader system for an unauthorized purpose.

The city disclosed in a civic alert Friday, Oct. 16, that the department discovered the potential misuse in September. The alleged unauthorized searches occurred between late 2024 and early 2025, according to the statement. The department referred the matter to the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office for review.

The officer has not been named. The city said the officer was already on an unrelated leave of absence when the information surfaced and has not served in an active-duty capacity for more than a year.

The department is also conducting an internal investigation to determine whether city or department policies were violated and whether employment action is warranted. The city said it would assist prosecutors and work to hold the officer accountable if criminal activity is confirmed.

* ABC Chicago…

Oak Brook police say automated license plate reader technology played a key role in identifying and charging a suspect following a deadly shooting at Oak Brook Center mall last month, while critics continue to raise concerns about privacy and potential misuse of the technology. […]

“Here in Oak Brook, we have three different vendors, Flock, Motorola and Minutemen technologies. They all do the same thing,” he said. […]

When asked whether the cameras make her feel safer, Augusta Guffroy, the founder of DeFlock lake County, told the I-Team, “I do not feel safer with flock cameras. Now, I think that they’re tools of intimidation. I don’t know who’s on the other side of that camera.”

The I-Team also reported that it uncovered at least 14 Chicago-area investigations involving alleged misuse of Flock cameras by police officers. Some of those cases were referred to county prosecutors, including three in DuPage County.

* Riverside Landmark…

Riverside trustees voted 4-2 on Thursday to not renew the village’s contract with Flock Safety for two automatic license plate reader cameras in town.

The contract is set to expire on its own terms on May 31, 2027, with the surveillance technology remaining in use until then. The village board will discuss whether to immediately sunset Riverside’s use of the cameras at their next meeting on Thursday, Nov. 5, and trustees directed staff to begin looking into alternatives to Flock, including village-owned cameras. […]

[ublic Safety Director Matthew Buckley] and [Police Commander James Lazansky] pointed to 57 cases the police department had solved since 2024 with the use of license plate readers, with 25 of them falling into vehicle-related crimes like eluding arrest, car theft and hit-and-runs. […]

During the board’s discussion, Evans said she believed Riverside’s automatic license plate reader policy, included within agenda materials for the Oct. 15 meeting, had been violated, namely under the section describing accountability, which calls for regular audits of searches for data originating from Riverside. […]

Evans referenced records of searches of Riverside’s Flock data with stated reasons for the search such as “LMAO,” a texting abbreviation for “laughing my a** off,” or “MYOC,” a phrase sometimes used in policing that stands for “make your own case,” a directive to find a reason to justify predetermined police action.

Buckley said the police department had caught “issues” that it “corrected … immediately” with its auditing process after residents “notified us of different things.”

* IPM Newsroom…

Faculty and students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign plan to review the school’s contracts with Flock and other companies providing automated license plate readers. […]

Student Senator Patrick Holt presented the idea and said the goal was greater transparency around artificial intelligence-enabled cameras.

“There’s not a lot publicly available besides that we have these contracts,” he said. “It’s a call mainly for greater transparency, using the Senate as a vehicle for that transparency.” […]

U of I spokesperson Pat Wade said by email that the university has 20 license plate readers that only record license plates and vehicles, not faces, and that they are all Flock cameras. He said the license plate readers have been central to University of Illinois Police Department investigations into suicidal or missing persons, sexual assault, aggravated battery, and stolen vehicles.

“There is a legitimate expectation that the use of ALPR technology should be understandable to the campus community and that policies governing and safeguarding its use should be clearly explained, and UIPD plans to continue engaging in activities and discussions to promote transparency and safety,” Wade said.

* The Washington Post…

In the five years after leaving the force, [Andrae Wright] searched the system more than 60 times without being stopped by anyone at the Georgia sheriff’s office, according to a statement by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Flock audit logs reviewed by The Post. He repeatedly searched the location of a vanity license plate bearing the middle name of his wife, according to the audit logs. The couple divorced this year, court records show, and at the time of some of his Flock searches, Wright was fighting for permanent custody of their teenage daughter. […]

The case marked one of at least 11 times in which government officials have discovered unauthorized users have gained access to Flock databases and searched them without permission, sometimes to track the locations of romantic partners, a Washington Post investigation has found. […]

Richmond, Virginia officials became aware of the unauthorized access when the ATF agent used the city’s Flock system to search for an immigrant in Illinois. Because Illinois is one of several states that ban the use of license-plate readers for immigration enforcement, Flock says it scans for searches like these and automatically prevents the state’s cameras from being accessed for this purpose.

Flock sent Richmond police an alert “that two searches from the ATF analyst inadvertently accessed Illinois vehicle data with ‘ICE’ in the query field,” the city said. Richmond immediately terminated the agent’s access, and the city later banned all access to its Flock system by federal agencies.

The city said this month it would not renew its contract with Flock.

* More…

* Gizmodo | Cop Fired for Letting Her ICE Agent Husband Use Her Flock Login: A Savannah, Georgia, police officer lost her job after giving her Flock login to her husband, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who used it to run hundreds of license plate searches on people his agency wanted to find. Former Savannah Police Department (SPD) officer Amber Harpe handed her username and password to Tyler Harpe because he had no Flock account through the Department of Homeland Security, according to internal records obtained by local news outlet WJCL. Savannah police don’t share their Flock data with ICE.

* NBC | How Flock’s cameras spread through government deals that bypassed public scrutiny: In less than a decade, Flock Safety’s license plate-reading cameras have spread across the United States. In dozens of communities, residents and their elected representatives never voted on whether to install them. An NBC News review of local government contracts and public records found that police departments and other officials regularly purchased Flock surveillance technology through deals that avoided competitive bidding or fell just below spending thresholds that require approval by elected representatives.

* AP | Texas man seeks to have armed robbery conviction tossed over no-warrant Flock camera search: Amid growing privacy concerns over Flock cameras, a Texas man has asked a federal appeals court to toss out his armed robbery conviction and 60-year prison sentence, arguing that the AI-powered camera system gives law enforcement more surveillance power than the Constitution allows. Police used Flock cameras to link Charles Brownlee to five armed robberies across several Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs in 2024 by compiling a “pattern of life” that traced his travels along North Texas roads monitored by Flock’s vehicle-scanning devices. The data gathered is so extensive and invasive that police should be required to obtain a search warrant, approved by a judge, before rifling through Flock data, Brownlee’s lawyers argue.

* Washington Sun | Flock Camera Company Adds Federal Lobbying Firepower: Flock spent $360,000 lobbying federal lawmakers and regulators from the beginning of July through the end of September, up from $210,000 during the same period in 2025, according to new disclosures filed this week under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. In mid-August, the company also hired a team of Democratic lobbyists at Invariant and others from the boutique Republican lobbying firm Off Hill Strategies. Invariant reported receiving $90,000 through the end of September to “educate policymakers about the use of public safety technology,” and Off Hill Strategies received $50,000 to lobby on “appropriate federal guardrails for ALPR technology.”