Pinellas County, Florida: a sheriff's deputy is accused of searching a woman's license plate 300 times in the agency's license-plate-reader system, including Flock cameras, because he wanted to date her; arrested and charged in September 2026

At a news conference on 30 September 2026, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said that an agency audit showed a deputy, hired in 2005, had queried the sheriff's office's automatic license-plate-reader database some 300 times for the plate of a 35-year-old woman he had arrested in 2010, to track the car of a woman he wanted to date (Tampa Bay Times). TCPalm and WFTS (Tampa Bay 28) report that the license-plate readers he used included Flock cameras. Investigators found that he queried the woman 381 times across five law enforcement databases between January 2025 and July 2026: 300 license-plate-reader searches, 32 searches of the state driver's license database, two of the Florida Crime Information Center, 18 of the statewide law enforcement records system and 29 of the office's records management system (WFTS). Of the 381 queries, 207 were made off duty (Tampa Bay Times; WFTS). The woman was not under investigation and investigators found no legitimate law enforcement reason for the searches (WFTS). According to TCPalm's account of the news conference, the deputy did not appear to contact the woman until 2024; he bought her jewelry and put her and her mother up at a place in Indian Rocks Beach, but she wanted to remain friends. When supervisors questioned him on 11 September he first said the searches were official, then admitted he wanted a relationship with the woman and that she had rebuffed his advances; he resigned that day (Tampa Bay Times). He did not enter a case number for the searches (WFTS). The investigation began with a media inquiry: TCPalm reports that it asked the sheriff's office on 20 August about abnormal Flock Safety searches by its personnel, as part of a TCPalm-USA TODAY investigation of Flock audit logs; TCPalm says its original inquiry concerned searches made through a service account shared by several users, and that the office later told it the inquiry had led it to identify a misuse. The sheriff said the searches appeared in the office's audit logs, but its audits were not focusing on high quantities of searches. The Tampa Bay Times describes license-plate-reader cameras as photographing passing cars, with artificial intelligence helping to categorize vehicles by make, model, color and plate. A second deputy arrested on the same day in a separate case is not part of this record: the sheriff said that case did not involve the license-plate-reader system.

According to the Pinellas County Sheriff, a deputy who wanted to date the woman searched her car's license plate 300 times in the agency's license-plate-reader system, including Flock cameras, and queried her 81 more times in other databases, with no law enforcement reason; she had declined his advances. He is charged with unlawfully accessing a computer system and official misconduct.

The deputy resigned on 11 September 2026 after supervisors questioned him about the searches. He was arrested on 30 September 2026 and charged with four counts of unlawfully accessing a computer system and one count of official misconduct, and was released after posting bond totaling $25,000 (Tampa Bay Times). The sheriff said his office would look more closely at high numbers of searches of a single plate and that vendors were working to make a case-number field mandatory (WFTS). No court outcome is reported.