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San Jose: police officer fired after passing Flock license-plate-reader location data to a relative accused of domestic violence, who used it to find his accuser

San Jose's police chief announced on 11 September 2026 that an officer had been fired after accessing the department's Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader data on his personal phone and giving a vehicle's location to his cousin, a suspect in a domestic-violence case, who used it to locate the woman accusing him. The chief called it 'a betrayal of the public trust', said the officer was placed on leave, criminally investigated and referred to the district attorney, and that the case was submitted to California's peace-officer standards commission for decertification; neither the officer nor the cousin has been charged. The department has since barred access to the system from personal devices and is testing auditing tools. Neither the victim nor the officer is named in the inspected reports.

AI System

Flock Safety automated license plate readers (San Jose Police Department camera network)

Flock Safety

Occurred

Event date unknown

Reported

11 September 2026

Event location

United States

Platform

other

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: supported. The police chief states that the officer accessed the department's Flock automated license-plate-reader data and provided it to the suspect, enabling him to locate the victim; ABC7 describes the system as the Flock camera system accessed on a personal phone. The automated readers generated the vehicle-location record about the victim; the disclosure was a human act.

AI-to-person relation

  • Made a claim about the person

Core relations are communication, acting on someone’s behalf, and depiction or impersonation. Decision and claim relations are retained as contextual cases.

An institution’s AI use. Settings: Privacy, Public services, Relationships.

Claim status: Corroborated

A San Jose police officer accessed the department's Flock license-plate-reader data on his personal phone and gave a vehicle's location to a relative who was a suspect in a domestic-violence case, enabling him to locate the woman accusing him.

Causal attribution: The chief's public account, carried by NBC Bay Area, and ABC7's report drawing on the Bay Area News Group; the locating of the accuser is the reported consequence.

  • Local tv news (supports): Chief Joseph: 'The officer accessed license plate reader data and provided that to a suspect in a domestic violence situation, which enabled that suspect to locate a victim'; 'accused of accessing Flock camera data on his personal phone to help a family member last spring'.
  • Local tv news (supports): 'the officer used his personal phone to access the Flock camera system and then provided the location of a vehicle to his cousin. The cousin subsequently used the information to track down his accuser, according to our partner the Bay Area News Group.'

Claim status: Corroborated

The officer was placed on leave, criminally investigated, referred to the district attorney and fired; the case was submitted to California POST for decertification; neither the officer nor the cousin has been charged.

Causal attribution: Departmental actions as announced; charging status per ABC7 on 13 September.

  • Local tv news (supports): 'we immediately placed this officer on administrative leave. We launched a criminal investigation into his conduct. We referred that investigation to the district attorney's office and we ultimately terminated'
  • Local tv news (supports): 'the officer's case was submitted to the State of California P.O.S.T. for a decertification investigation'; 'Neither the officer nor the cousin has been criminally charged.'

Claim status: Corroborated

The department barred access to the system from personal devices and is testing auditing tools to flag access without a lawful purpose.

Causal attribution: Policy responses as reported by both outlets.

  • Local tv news (supports): 'he has made changes to the policy to ensure the data cannot be accessed on a personal device'
  • Local tv news (supports): 'officers are no longer permitted to access the system on their personal devices'; 'testing new smart auditing tools to flag possible access without a lawful purpose'

What remains unknown

  • The date of the disclosure is given only as 'last spring' by the chief; the incident date is left unknown rather than inferred.
  • What happened after the suspect located the victim is not reported; no injury or further offence is described in the inspected sources.
  • The officer's and the cousin's identities and the status of the domestic-violence case are not reported in the inspected sources.
  • The Bay Area News Group original cited by ABC7 was not inspected.
Source reading, translation and location

Local tv news · en · Source inspected

Read in English on 2026-09-16 (datePublished 2026-09-11T17:29-07:00; Robert Handa; the chief's on-camera quotes).

Local tv news · en · Source inspected

Read in English on 2026-09-16 (datePublished 2026-09-13T22:49Z; KGO; cites the Bay Area News Group for the cousin locating his accuser).

Event countries: United States. Affected-person countries: United States. Court countries: Unknown.

Event: San Jose Police Department's camera network and the locating of the victim, San Jose, California (both reports). The victim's residence is not stated beyond the San Jose case; no court proceeding is reported.

Reviewed for publication 2026-09-16: Published under the 2026-09-15 charter as an institutional privacy and safety case: automated license-plate-reader records about a domestic-violence accuser were passed by an officer to the suspect, who used them to find her, as stated publicly by the police chief and reported by two local outlets. The victim, officer and suspect are unnamed in the sources and here; the AI component generated the location record and the misuse is recorded as a human act.

What Happened

San Jose Police Chief Paul Joseph said on Friday 11 September 2026 that an officer had been fired after accessing the department's Flock license-plate-reader camera data on his personal phone to help a family member 'last spring'. 'The officer accessed license plate reader data and provided that to a suspect in a domestic violence situation, which enabled that suspect to locate a victim,' Joseph told NBC Bay Area. 'When we learned about this, we immediately placed this officer on administrative leave. We launched a criminal investigation into his conduct. We referred that investigation to the district attorney's office and we ultimately terminated the officer.' He called it 'a betrayal of the public trust, plain and simple'.

ABC7 reported that the officer used his personal phone to access the Flock camera system and provided a vehicle's location to his cousin, who was a suspect in a domestic-violence case and, according to the Bay Area News Group, used the information to track down his accuser. In a statement the chief said: 'When an officer violates the public's trust this severely, my responsibility is clear: that person cannot remain in a position of police authority, and they cannot wear the San Jose badge. This technology is new; the standard is not.' The department submitted the case to the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for a decertification investigation. Neither the officer nor the cousin has been criminally charged; a former prosecutor told ABC7 that because the officer had authorised access to the database, existing statutes on confidential criminal databases may not clearly apply.

The department has since barred officers from accessing the system on personal devices and said it was testing auditing tools to flag access without a lawful purpose. The disclosure came amid an EFF and ACLU lawsuit over San Jose's use of the cameras, in which a judge had issued a tentative ruling favouring the city, and after Santa Clara County agencies pulled back from Flock cameras over privacy concerns.

Reported harm

A woman who had accused a man of domestic violence was located by him after a police officer passed him her vehicle's automated license-plate-reader location data; the inspected reports describe the locating but no further consequence.

Exploitation or Abuse

Outcome

Ongoing

Officer placed on administrative leave, criminally investigated, referred to the Santa Clara County district attorney and terminated; case submitted to California POST for decertification; neither the officer nor the cousin has been criminally charged (ABC7, 13 September 2026). Policy changes: no access to the system from personal devices; testing of auditing tools to flag access without a lawful purpose.

People described

An unnamed woman who had accused the officer's cousin of domestic violence; the cousin used the plate-reader location data to find her

People reported harmed in this case

1 person

0 AI participants · 1 other person harmed

One person: the domestic-violence accuser whom the suspect located using the data (NBC Bay Area, ABC7).

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Tags

#flock#alpr#license-plate-reader#police#domestic-violence#privacy#san-jose#california#institutional-use

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). San Jose: police officer fired after passing Flock license-plate-reader location data to a relative accused of domestic violence, who used it to find his accuser. NOPE: AI and people. https://nope.net/incidents/2026-san-jose-officer-flock-alpr-data-domestic-violence-accuser

BibTeX

@misc{2026_san_jose_officer_flock_alpr_data_domestic_violence_accuser,
  title = {San Jose: police officer fired after passing Flock license-plate-reader location data to a relative accused of domestic violence, who used it to find his accuser},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {NOPE: AI and people},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2026-san-jose-officer-flock-alpr-data-domestic-violence-accuser}
}

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