The Milwaukee detective investigating license-plate camera abuse used the same system to stalk two people, logging his reason as “test.”

A Milwaukee internal affairs detective was charged with felony misconduct in public office after prosecutors said he used the department’s Flock license-plate reader network to track two people roughly 20 times, logging “test” and “training” as his reasons, and planting a GPS tracker on one victim’s car. He was one of the investigators on the department’s prior Flock abuse case, in which an officer searched an ex-partner’s movements more than 200 times. The misuse surfaced only through the department-wide audit that earlier case forced, and the victim initially declined to file a complaint out of concern for the ramifications. The Institute for Justice has documented at least 21 cases since 2024 of officers accessing the same system for personal use.

Why this matters. No model failed here. The environment did. Access to a high-consequence system was granted wholesale rather than scoped to demonstrated need, the justification field accepted anything typed into it, the audit ran after the harm and only by accident of an adjacent case, and the person harmed had no viable path to raise the alarm. Those are the deployment conditions AVAAS-D exists to test, and they fail the same way whether the system is a plate reader or an AI agent holding credentials. Self-policing by the operator is not verification, and this case is the cleanest possible demonstration of why.