In our May issue, we examined Sarasota’s expanding network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) and the increasingly controversial company behind them, Flock Safety. For law enforcement, the cameras tucked along our streets are a force multiplier, offering faster leads, clearer timelines and a way to solve cases that might otherwise go cold. For critics, however, they’re part of an unsettling architecture of mass surveillance—a system being built before the public fully understands its reach or has decided how it should be regulated by local governments.

Across the country, warnings about how the system can be abused aren't theoretical. Misreads by Flock’s cameras and failures by officers to verify what the technology tells them have led to innocent people being stopped at gunpoint, mauled by police dogs and jailed. The most widely known form of misuse comes from officers turning the system into a tool for stalking and harassment, often targeting women with whom they have had a romantic involvement. In 2024, the police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas, used Flock’s system 228 times to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her new partner. In Georgia, the police chief of Braselton was arrested for using the same technology to harass personal targets.

Now, law enforcement misuse has surfaced in our own backyard. 

Last Wednesday, the Sarasota Police Department (SPD) arrested and fired one of its own. Cory Waiters, 38, who joined SPD in 2023, faces felony counts of official misconduct and computer-related offenses, along with a misdemeanor public records charge.

According to police, the department learned Aug. 6 that Waiters had allegedly misused the Flock database and DAVID, the state's Driver and Vehicle Information Database, after USA Today reporter Jack Lemnus wrote to the department’s public information office. Lemnus noted that based on publicly available records, Waiters had run roughly 335 searches on a single vehicle. He was placed on paid leave the following day and terminated upon his arrest. In an interview with ABC7, Lemnus said “he [Waiters] would use his phone to access Flock off hours or in the middle of the night, sometimes hundreds of times in a single day. For example, there was one day in June where he searched the single license plate that we’re discussing 121 times just in that one day.”

In a news release, Sarasota Police Chief Rex Troche said “We take allegations of misconduct seriously. When an agency member’s actions fall short of the standards and professionalism we expect, we will address it appropriately and without hesitation.” 

The arrest comes as the technology is facing sustained scrutiny in Sarasota. Just days before Waiters was taken into custody, a Flock camera on South Tuttle Avenue near Hibiscus Street was deliberately battered offline, causing roughly $800 in damage, one of many cameras in the area that the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office and the North Port Police Department say have been targeted. And, just north of us, over the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge, one man’s protest has drawn national attention. At 77, Carl Gunn has taken to sitting in a chair beneath Flock cameras around Pinellas County, holding a sign on a long pole to block their view—earning himself the nickname “Flock Blocker.” 

Following months of increasing friction, Flock recently announced a series of changes to its platform. Beginning next year, Flock says agencies will be required to use its Audit Assistance feature, which it released in April. This previously optional tool, which only about one-third of users had activated, including SPD, is designed to flag unusual search behavior. Searches will also require a case number, another safeguard that was previously optional. What remains unclear is whether those case numbers will be cross-checked against an agency’s records management system to confirm that they correspond to legitimate cases. For critics, that distinction matters, particularly given how easily similar safeguards have been circumvented in the past. At one Oregon police department, for example, officers entered “investigation” 111 times and “hehehe” 20 times into the required search field.

Since Waiters’ abnormal search activity was flagged through public records rather than an internal auditing system, does SPD have any plans to change or enhance safeguards? Will the new case-number system cross-check against a local records management system to verify the legitimacy of searches? The City of Sarasota referred a reporter to SPD, and SPD reiterated that the department has been utilizing the Audit Assistance feature since its inception, and that the records attainable through the feature only go back to 2026. However, an agency-wide compliance audit extending to December 2020 was completed in response to the Waiters investigation.

In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said that law enforcement personnel should be given higher standards of accountability. “I don’t think that Flock created police abuse,” he said. “I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.”

The company is also reducing its data retention policy from 30 days to 7 days. This can be adjusted based on state or local policy, and agencies can choose to preserve data longer than the policy allows in some cases. 

Critics, civil liberties groups and legal experts have responded to the changes with skepticism. Robert Frommer, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, called the changes “window dressing” from a company in “panic mode” that doesn’t address the “fundamental problem, which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants.”

The American Civil Liberties Union’s senior policy counsel Chad Marlow is doubtful as to whether it’s possible to transform a widespread surveillance system into one that is protective of civil rights. He added that this is true, especially with a company like Flock, “whose nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits.”

Efforts to clarify how—and whether—SPD and the City of Sarasota plan to address public concerns left many details up in the air. But for a rapidly growing number of Sarasotans, the question remains: How much power to track our movements should be entrusted to law enforcement, and who gets to decide where that power ends?