Photo by Adam Webb - Getty Images
Traffic Cameras
“You said it would happen!”
“What were they thinking?”
“Are they ALL liars?”
“They said they had guardrails and precautions!”
The texts came pouring in Tuesday night. Over the past year, community members at dozens of meetings have given clear warnings about how easily, and often, police misuse Flock. It has happened all over the country. We said it was just a matter of time before it happened in Milwaukee - and now it is, here we are.
Flock may sound innocent enough, but like the name suggests, we’re all just sheep to be watched. Flock cameras are automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras that take photos of the license plate, make and model of a car, and indicate where and when that vehicle was at specific moments—every car that passes it. Flock is a private surveillance company that sells its services to the Milwaukee Police Department, and about 7,000 other police departments across the country. It turns out that it is very easy for police and ICE to access this data, regardless of local laws, and combine it with many other types of surveillance data that the police collect.
Access and Abuse
Milwaukee Police Officer, Josue Ayala, abused his access to police surveillance technology to stalk a love interest and their ex. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the story keeps repeating itself in Wisconsin and the rest of the country.
In Greenfield, former Police Chief Jay Johnson abused surveillance tech to spy on his now ex-wife.
In Menasha, former Police Officer Cristian Morales used it on his ex.
And now, Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala stands accused of having abused this surveillance tech 179 times in a two-month period! He ran one victim’s license plate 55 times, and the other victim’s plate 124 times. Not a casual mistake, not a temporary lapse of judgment—an intentional, repeated practice. The guardrails in place did not prevent this. MPD’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 735 on ALPRs did prevent this. In fact, according to the ACLU, the vague search term Officer Ayala used in the Flock system—“investigation”—has been used over 1,000 times by MPD in 2025. How did this come to light? According to the criminal complaint, not through any MPD guardrails or an internal auditing process - but because the victim found their license plate on the website haveibeenflocked.com, which aggregates audit logs that have been released via open records requests. That is: it sounds like MPD didn’t even catch this issue—a victim, and a public transparency website did.
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ICE Storm
As individual police officers continue to use Flock surveillance technology to stalk intimate partners—especially women—nationwide, ICE and CBP have consistently gained access to Flock data to stalk our immigrant neighbors.
The Milwaukee Police Department and the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department need to stop surveilling our citizens all the time. Both the constant presumption of our guilt creating the need to monitor us 24/7, and the pipedream of constant surveillance as a potential investigative lead is nonsense when weighed against the very real impact of abuse at the hands of an out-of-control federal government who can access all of this data whenever they want. Remember, ICE used similar local surveillance info, and our stolen medical records to fuel their software guiding them to the neighborhoods where they unleashed violence in Minneapolis and Chicago—leaving a wave of broken laws, chaos and dead bodies in their wake. Due to our fusion centers and lack of meaningful protections, DHS can access local police surveillance data, and combine that with mined social media and medical data to target specific neighborhoods.
State law enforcement also share Flock data with one another. This is why it was easy for police officers from Loveland, Colorado, to access the Denver PD’s Flock to share with federal agents, as a slimy way of navigating permissions and protocols. ICE gets the info from you whether you want them to or not.
The Guardian just reported how “hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations,” from Flock cameras in Texas school districts. Is this what our local law enforcement wants too?
This scenario isn’t too far-fetched given that back in September, Milwaukee Police Association President Alex Ayala requested that President Trump send in the National Guard for something as petty as kids doing donuts.
Locally, we have seen the damage 10-year MPD veteran Officer Juwon Madlock did by sharing information on his police colleagues with gangs. Imagine the exponential harm people like him can do when they can track folks in real time as their vehicles drive through the city.
Dangerous New Tools
Sadly, no one is surprised. It’s part of an all-too familiar pattern: local law enforcement and the federal government get powerful new toys—in this case “automatic license plate readers (ALPR)” called Flock cameras, or facial recognition technology (FRT), or drones, or cellsite simulators, or social media trackers (the list goes on and on), and they abuse them.
Elected and appointed officials at both the county and city levels said this would happen. The public said this would happen. Media has reported that this is happening all across the country. And lo and behold, in the same month the Milwaukee Police Department put a moratorium on using Facial Recognition Technology after tremendous public pressure, and the revelation that they had continued borrowing the technology with no policy in place … here they are, found abusing another type of omnipresent surveillance gadget.
We need to ban FLOCK cameras—not allow people to stalk women and targets.
We need to ban Facial Recognition Technology—not just give the dangerous tech a time out.
We need meaningful, real protections against surveillance technologies that are community-driven and informed by evidence and best practices. We need frameworks for using surveillance technology safely—frameworks like the ACLU’s Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS).
We need to refocus on making Milwaukee healthy, safe, equitable and prosperous—not some cage free panopticon where horny men with guns earning upwards of $115,000 per year can stalk us or sell info on us. (According to Open Payroll that is what Josue Ayala made in 2023.)
And to get there, we need to call our mayor, our alderpeople, and the Business Improvement Districts that have emphatically supported these technologies—tell them I told you so.
