A part-time police dispatcher in Highland Heights, Ohio, ran more than 20,000 searches of the city's Flock Safety license-plate camera database in about a year — many of them, her own chief says, to track people she knew for personal reasons — and nobody in the department noticed, because nobody was checking. The scale of the misuse only became visible after she resigned: in the first full month after her departure, the entire department recorded just 130 Flock searches, a fall of more than 95 percent from the April figure reported by WKYC.

Source: WKYC reporting, via Gadget Review

Public-records data compiled by HaveIBeenFlocked, a site that tracks Flock use through records requests, and shared with Cleveland 19 attribute 20,292 searches to a single Highland Heights user between October 24, 2024, and November 22, 2025 — an average of about 51 searches a day over 394 days. Five license plates were each searched more than 1,000 times in that period, according to reporting by the News-Herald and cleveland.com. The second-highest search total recorded by any other Highland Heights employee was 930, cleveland.com reported.

How it came to light — a newspaper asked

Police Chief Dennis Matejcic said he did not know the misuse was occurring until an inquiry by The Washington Post brought it to the department's attention in August, as reported by the News-Herald. The department then investigated, determined the searches were unrelated to authorized police work, and the dispatcher resigned. "She was tracking people that she knew," Matejcic told WKYC. "She was doing things for her personal reasons."

Source: Daily Inference, summarising WKYC and Cleveland 19

Highland Heights is a city in Cuyahoga County in northeast Ohio, in the Cleveland suburbs. Its police department uses Flock Safety's network of automated license plate readers — roadside cameras that photograph passing vehicles and log the plate, time and place, which officers and dispatchers can later search during investigations. Chief Matejcic has said the cameras help in cases such as shoplifting investigations when suspects flee in vehicles.

The oversight gap: the logs existed, nobody read them

Before this case, Highland Heights had no dedicated Flock policy and conducted no routine reviews of search activity, according to News-Herald reporting. That gap mattered because the technical safeguard already existed: Flock says every search is recorded and tied to an individual user, giving supervisors the ability to review access histories, according to the company's published trust documentation. The records were being kept — they simply were not being examined until a national newspaper asked about them.

The department is looking into potential charges, the chief said, but no charges have been reported so far. Nothing in the reporting so far indicates that the drivers whose plates were repeatedly searched were ever notified, and the available reporting identifies no requirement that they be told. Highland Heights driver Kelly Sanders told WKYC that learning about the misuse damaged her trust in the police, though the new oversight steps gave her some hope.

Why a searched plate is more than a plate

Flock's system does not itself identify drivers or passengers; it records vehicle characteristics. But Erman Ayday, a computer scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told Yahoo News that advances in vehicle recognition can expose details such as make, model and bumper stickers, and that repeated location records can reveal sensitive patterns about where a vehicle — and therefore its owner — travels. A plate queried more than 1,000 times over a year builds exactly that kind of pattern. Flock says plate data is stored in AWS Government Cloud and defaults to a rolling seven-day hard deletion, though agency policy, law and contract settings can extend retention.

Ohio's wider camera debate

Highland Heights is not an isolated Ohio case. A state tracking project counts about 6,900 mapped plate readers across 80 of Ohio's 88 counties, and other Ohio employees have faced consequences for personal searches: a Columbus officer who searched one plate hundreds of times was relieved of duty, and two Reynoldsburg officers who searched a former domestic partner's vehicle resigned, according to local reporting compiled by the Cracked Buckeye tracking project. Ohio law currently provides only a public-records exemption for plate-reader data — Ohio Revised Code 149.43(A)(1)(yy) — with no statewide rules on retention, sharing or misuse, and Attorney General Wilson has said there is currently no penalty for misusing the data, according to News 5 Cleveland reporting cited by the project. State lawmakers have debated restricting Flock-style systems, but those proposals had not been enacted into statewide law, Yahoo News reported.

What happens next

The monthly audits are now the department's central accountability test: their value depends on whether supervisors actually read them and act on what they find. Whether the former dispatcher faces criminal charges remains undecided in the public record, and whether the people she tracked will ever be told is unanswered. For drivers across Ohio — including the Punjabi trucking families who pass through the Cleveland corridor on Interstates 90, 80 and 271 every day — the case is a concrete reminder that plate-camera databases record ordinary journeys at scale, and that the safeguard is not the camera log itself but whether anyone in authority ever looks at it.