William Copp was given broad access to Flock Safety’s powerful license-plate reader system as a part-time police officer in Prairie Grove, a small village about an hour northwest of Chicago.
Flock’s cameras track every driver that passes them, logging billions of license-plate scans in databases that can potentially be searched by any law enforcement agency that pays for access.
Prosecutors in McHenry County now say Copp was using Flock to stalk his former partners and others in his orbit, conducting hundreds of searches tracking their movements.
“He knows everything about me,” one of them said in a petition for a protective order. “It scares me to death that he could still be using another system to track me.”
Law enforcement officials say Flock’s system helps crack cases by allowing them to easily pinpoint crime suspects. But critics argue the technology has largely gone unchecked and is ripe for abuse.
Copp, who also served as chief of the Holiday Hills Police Department, is among the dozens of police officials across the country who have been charged with making unauthorized Flock searches.
By the time Copp was taken into custody this summer, the Chicago suburbs had already emerged as ground zero in a nationwide fight over Flock.
Some municipalities have jettisoned the technology, while others have bought in. And as activists raise awareness about a policing tool they say tramples on their constitutional rights, some have been charged with stealing and defacing Flock’s cameras and sensors.
In Illinois, Flock’s massive cache of license-plate data has been accessed by out-of-state officials monitoring abortions and by federal immigration agents whose coordination with local police is restricted under state law.
But, amid fears that rapidly evolving mass surveillance technology like Flock is outpacing regulation, legislation aimed at bolstering protections has stalled in Springfield.
“There’s so much information collected in a day, we want to make sure that information won’t just sit there and be available because there has been misuse,” said Khadine Bennett, director of advocacy and intergovernmental affairs for the ACLU of Illinois.
‘He has been stalking us for two years’
License plate readers turn photos of passing cars into text descriptions that can be searched in a database, using the make, model, license plate and location of a vehicle. Users can then set alerts and get notifications for specific vehicles and plates.
Advocates question whether arrests stemming from Flock alerts are constitutional, given that plate-reader databases can be searched without a warrant in Illinois.
“It seems that these tools are used as a means of circumventing Fourth Amendment rights,” said Matt Chapman, data and systems engineer at Lucy Parsons Lab, a digital privacy rights group based in Chicago.
Reports of cops misusing Flock’s system are now grabbing headlines, as scrutiny of the company continues to grow.
Frank McGrath, a former sheriff’s deputy in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, was hit with felony charges this month after an audit revealed that he’d used Flock to spy on a co-worker, according to the agency.
As Copp faces his own felony charges of official misconduct, he has also been ordered to stay away from some of his alleged victims.
“He has been stalking us for two years, I fear daily he is following myself and [my child],” one of Copp’s former partners wrote in a petition for a protective order. “I just want to feel as if I can go about my day with a bit of a sense of security.”
Jordan Greenberg, an attorney for another person Copp allegedly stalked, said his client now spots Flock cameras regularly and is paranoid about being followed.
Greenberg said police departments need more protections to ensure abuses are caught earlier.
“What’s concerning to me is this individual was able to unlawfully use Flock more than 100 times and there weren’t any procedural safeguards to catch it or stop it,” he said. “It’s concerning that officers can do that without getting caught.”
Copp’s attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Flock users tout arrests
Flock proponents say misconduct is rare and insist its license plate readers are vital tools for law enforcement.
Last month in Illinois, Flock’s cameras pinged 61 license plates flagged in missing persons cases and 6,000 plates linked to stolen cars, according to Paris Lewbel, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based company. He couldn’t say how many of those cases were solved.
“Instead of searching through hours of video, you can search for that description [of a vehicle],” said Lewbel, a former police officer in Aurora. “It’s just an investigative lead that helps them.”
Press releases sent by public relations firms and approved by Flock have credited its plate readers for helping arrest an alleged hit-and-run driver in Rockford and a man accused of sexually abusing a minor in Hampshire.
In the lead-up to Park Ridge renewing its $24,000 contract with Flock last month, police chief Bob Kampwirth said his department used Flock cameras to enforce traffic laws and track down cars involved in crimes, including in stalking and domestic violence cases.
The Lake County Sheriff’s office, which purchased 15 plate readers in 2024, has credited Flock cameras for arrests in at least 10 cases, including car thefts, robberies and a shooting.
Now, other police agencies are going all in on Flock.
Harvey announced a sweeping partnership with the company last month, giving the small, cash-strapped city in the south suburbs software to integrate license plate scanners, gunshot-detection systems and video cameras optimized with artificial intelligence.
“Like everything else, this is a tool,” said Dale Mitchell, Harvey’s new police chief, as he sat in the glow of a Flock camera map projected onto a massive screen at the city’s so-called crime center.
“The tool is only as good as the people using it.”
Shutting down Flock
Evanston is among the Chicago-area suburbs that have cut the cord on Flock.
Daniel Biss, mayor of the north suburb, said his administration took that step after learning Flock data had been accessed by federal immigration agents and “out-of-state prosecutors enforcing out-of-state abortion bans.”
“We had these because we felt they could be useful tools, but the risk was too great,” said Biss, a Democratic candidate in the congressional district that includes Evanston.
Illinois law bars out-of-state law enforcement from using plate readers to investigate people seeking health care that’s legal in Illinois. And Illinois’ TRUST Act prohibits local police from working with federal immigration agents.
Flock says users have to choose to share data, and such sharing isn’t otherwise required unless compelled by a subpoena or other legal measure. But there’s still been hundreds of violations.
The Illinois secretary of state’s office investigated the Mount Prospect Police Department last summer after its data was accessed by officials in Texas. That Flock search sought a woman whose family was concerned she had a self-administered abortion.
A statewide audit of the technology found Flock “did not have proper safeguards in place for data sharing” and that the northwest suburb’s data was accessed in hundreds of immigration-related searches in early 2025.
The audit also found that data from Forest Park’s Motorola Solutions plate readers was shared with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Chicago-based Motorola Solutions, which has also provided plate readers to the Chicago Police Department and Illinois State Police, has since said it cut off the agency’s access to cameras in Illinois and taken steps to ensure state laws aren’t broken. Flock announced similar measures.
Freddy Martinez, co-executive director of Lucy Parsons Lab, said he remains skeptical.
“All these data privacy laws and the Illinois TRUST Act are effectively unenforceable,” Martinez said. “It’s impossible to know where your data ends up and who is accessing it for legitimate reasons or otherwise.
“There is no meaningful way to prevent these kinds of abuses when the entire business model depends on massive amounts of data collection.”
Legislation stalls in Springfield
Scrutiny of license plate readers has grown as Flock has built up its massive network, but law enforcement agencies in Illinois have long used the technology.
Chicago cops have had plate readers since at least 2006, although a department spokesperson said it doesn’t have an active contract with Flock.
The Tamara Clayton Expressway Camera Act, named for the victim of a deadly shooting on Interstate 57, was passed in 2020, giving the state police money for its own plate readers.
Gov. JB Pritzker has since poured millions more dollars into the program, adding counties while allowing searches to be used to investigate more crimes.
The state police has 588 Motorola plate readers statewide, about 300 of which are on Cook County’s expressways and DuSable Lake Shore Drive, according to the state police. While the cameras have scanned more than three billion vehicles over the past year, the hit rate for flagged vehicles was less than 3%.
Passing legislation that ensures more oversight has proved challenging.
Bennett, of the ACLU of Illinois, said a key sticking point has been the amount of time that data can be held. Advocates have called for a three-day retention period, but police have pushed for more — with some asking to keep it in perpetuity.
Members of the General Assembly have now proposed the Automated License Plate Recognition System Act, which would require annual audits and set stricter statewide standards for acceptable plate reader use.
Another pending bill would regulate what the technology can be used for, establish criminal charges for misuse and clarify which municipalities have plate readers and how the data is used.
Both pieces of legislation would set shorter data storage limits than the 90 days the state police allows or the year dictated by Chicago police policy. The bills haven’t advanced out of committee.
“When law enforcement leans more on surveillance tools than being in their communities, it’s really important to assess if it’s really working as it’s intended,” Bennett said.