A West Chicago police officer has been placed on administrative leave while investigators examine whether he misused the department's Flock Safety license plate camera system, city officials say. The suspected unauthorized use dates back to December 2024, according to a city statement, and has prompted West Chicago to open a broader review of how its police department accesses and audits surveillance technology.
City officials say they could not release further information because the investigation is ongoing, according to CBS News. The city has preserved records related to the suspected unauthorized use and has asked the DuPage County State's Attorney's Office to determine whether criminal charges are warranted, with West Chicago saying it is cooperating fully with that inquiry. The city has also conducted a full review of its Flock automated license plate recognition system and added early-detection auditing tools designed to flag irregular search patterns going forward.
A Broader Audit Beyond One Officer
Beyond the individual case, West Chicago says it is now conducting a wider audit covering system usage, access, auditing practices, oversight, training, policies, procedures and safeguards tied to its Flock cameras and other police technology. City officials say they will monitor best practices as that review continues, though they have not said when it might conclude.
The scrutiny in West Chicago follows a DuPage County pattern. Just days earlier, an Itasca Police Department officer was terminated and referred to the same DuPage County State's Attorney's Office after an internal audit turned up unauthorized technology use, a case detailed in Hoodline's earlier report. Itasca sits in the same county judicial circuit as West Chicago, meaning DuPage prosecutors are now weighing multiple parallel technology misuse probes at once.
A National Pattern of Misuse
The West Chicago case lands amid mounting national evidence that Flock's camera network has been repeatedly turned to personal ends by the officers meant to police it. A Washington Post investigation published August 2, 2026, found police officers had been accused in at least 46 instances of misusing Flock's license plate camera network, with many of those cases involving officers tracking women, per the Washington Post's reporting. The public-interest law firm Institute for Justice has separately identified more than 100 verified incidents of automated license plate reader abuse nationwide, including stalking and wrongful traffic stops.
Some of those cases carry criminal weight. A former Kenosha, Wisconsin sheriff's deputy was charged with using Flock cameras to track a fellow deputy he was dating. Closer to West Chicago, William Copp, a part-time officer in Prairie Grove, Illinois, was charged with official misconduct in July 2026 after being accused of running nearly 250 unauthorized Flock searches through his department's account.
Flock's Response and Illinois' Legal Guardrails
Flock Safety's chief executive has apologized for instances in which the company's data was misused by law enforcement, according to CBS News's report. On August 13, 2026, the company announced platform-wide changes requiring every police search to be tied to a valid criminal case number, making automated audit alerts mandatory, and cutting the recommended default data retention window from 30 days to seven, a shift reported by SFGATE.
Illinois already has some statutory guardrails in place. Under 625 ILCS 5/2-130, enacted through House Bill 3326 in 2023, automated license plate reader operators in the state are barred from sharing vehicle location data with out-of-state agencies investigating abortion access or immigration status, according to the Illinois General Assembly. State Representative Jaime Andrade Jr. introduced House Bill 5231 in March 2026, which would require law enforcement agencies to publish public reports on when and why they access ALPR databases, a step lawmakers say would create a clearer audit trail than currently exists.
Weighing Public Safety Against Oversight Gaps
Automated license plate readers do provide public safety benefits, and Illinois has invested heavily in expanding the technology. The state accelerated funding for stationary readers through the Tamara Clayton Expressway Camera Act, expanding it in June 2022 with more than $20 million to install hundreds of roadside cameras, a law named for a postal worker murdered on an expressway and aimed at tracking fleeing violent offenders, per the Illinois State Police.
Locally, appetite for the cameras remains mixed. The Will County Board recently renewed Flock camera contracts in Mokena, Crete, Manhattan, Frankfort, Naperville and Wilmington, while Harvey, Illinois expanded its own Flock contract to include Flock Safety drones. Other departments have gone the opposite direction, canceling contracts outright amid the same privacy concerns now playing out in West Chicago.
Research from the ACLU of Indiana found that less than 1% of the billions of monthly vehicle plate scans captured by Flock cameras match an active criminal warrant or stolen vehicle report, while roughly 10% of in-state plates are misread by the software altogether, according to a Hoodline report on a separate Porter County misuse case. That low hit rate has become a central talking point for critics questioning whether mass camera collection justifies the oversight gaps that let officers like Copp allegedly run hundreds of unauthorized searches before anyone noticed.
