User:Louis/DC police union grievance over Flock officer tracking

Washington's Metropolitan Police Department used Flock Safety mass-surveillance cameras through its Internal Affairs unit to secretly track sworn officers who were themselves under internal investigation. The department's position is that the tracking was appropriate. The D.C. Police Union, whose president is Gregg Pemberton, learned of the practice in July 2026, filed a class grievance demanding it stop, and saw that grievance denied.

The dispute is now headed to arbitration, and privacy advocates say there is no known prior case of a police department deploying Flock automated license plate readers against its own personnel. The same departments that defend this technology when it is trained on the general public produced a police union that objects to it the moment it is trained on police.

What Flock cameras are

Flock Safety sells automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras that photograph passing vehicles, read the plate, and log each vehicle's location, time, and physical features into a searchable database. The company says its network includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. In Washington, MPD operates 67 Flock readers across the District that scan roughly 400,000 tags a day and store the results for up to 90 days, figures reported by NOTUS. The American Civil Liberties Union describes the product this way: ALPR companies like Flock are quietly trying to build a nationwide mass surveillance system that tracks, logs, and shares drivers' movements without a warrant.

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  CNN reports that Flock's network includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states.
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  The ACLU's Get the Flock Out campaign page describes ALPR companies like Flock as quietly trying to build a nationwide mass surveillance system that tracks movements without a warrant.

Internal Affairs tracking of officers

MPD's Internal Affairs detectives used the Flock network to track the whereabouts of sworn officers suspected of misconduct, without those officers' knowledge. Union officials learned of the practice in July 2026, according to a September 10, 2026 press release from Pemberton reported by The Record. Pemberton's stated objection is procedural and specific: department managers ran the searches for noncriminal investigations. He told WTOP the access broke both MPD's own rules and Flock's terms of use:

We discovered that managers in the department were accessing the system for noncriminal investigations, which is a violation of the general order and it's a violation of the Flock user agreement.

Union President Gregg Pemberton told WTOP that managers accessing the Flock system for noncriminal investigations was a violation of the general order and it's a violation of the Flock user agreement.

The union submitted a class grievance in July 2026 demanding that the Flock-related violations stop. Management denied the grievance and refused to investigate the managers who ran the searches. The same day it denied the grievance, MPD issued a new teletype (a department-wide directive) restricting department-wide access to the Flock system and routing every query through a single clearinghouse at the Real-Time Crime Center. Pemberton described the timing to WTOP as an admission that the access had been a problem:

The same day they denied the grievance, they actually published a teletype restricting everyone's access to the Flock database and limiting it only to one clearinghouse down at the Real-Time Crime Center.

MPD's position and the arbitration

MPD defended the tracking. A department spokesperson gave three named outlets the same one-line statement: the use of the license plate reader in the misconduct investigation was appropriate. The full statement WTOP published framed the fight as an ordinary labor dispute over an Internal Affairs investigation into a union member's misconduct. The department declined to comment to The Record about the new access restrictions or their timing. By MPD's own statement, the dispute with the union is headed to arbitration.

Washington's Metropolitan Police Department defended tracking officers under investigation, telling The Record its position is that the use of LPR in the misconduct investigation was appropriate.

The D.C. Council is asking its own questions. On September 14, 2026, Council member Brooke Pinto, chairwoman of the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, wrote MPD Interim Chief Jeffery Carroll a letter asking for answers to 10 questions about how the department uses Flock data and why it needs the technology at all, per The Record.

Pemberton's Fourth Amendment argument

Pemberton's public argument runs past the internal-affairs episode to the technology itself. He told the Washington Post, as quoted by The Record, that the union has broad constitutional concerns about Flock:

a lot of concerns about whether or not there's a constitutional question that needs to be addressed

He rejects the label the product is sold under. He told WTOP that calling Flock a license plate reader is a misnomer:

the system is significantly more powerful than, you know, a camera that takes pictures of license plates.

He compared the moment to the debate over body-worn cameras a decade earlier, when the department, the union, and the public weighed in on how the program should work, and argued that Flock is more powerful and more intrusive than a body camera.

The union's written position, as reported by The Record and the Labor Relations Information System, is that a system this capable needs both guardrails and disclosure:

A system with such broad and extensive capabilities requires not only significant guardrails but also full transparency with the public. [...] The MPD has provided neither.

Guardrails police now demand for themselves

The union is now demanding, for officers, the exact controls that civil-liberties groups have spent years demanding for everyone else. The Record quotes Pemberton saying officer trust cannot be built without equal treatment:

by tightening rules on the rank and file while refusing to investigate the officials who abuse the system

The union's press release states that the department must apply the same justification, logging, and audit rules to officers at every rank. Justification requirements, access logging, and equal audit rules are the same guardrails the ACLU packaged into the model ALPR legislation it released in February 2026 and the Fourth Amendment argument it filed as a Fourth Circuit amicus brief in April 2026.

Jake Laperruque, a surveillance expert at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told The Record the union's posture is unprecedented:

I've never seen a rank and file [police] union like this vociferously calling to say the power police have needs to be rolled back. [...] It really speaks to how strong the enthusiasm against Flock is that... even police in a major department are saying we should not have these powers.

Police departments adopted Flock's warrantless location tracking of the general public and defended it as a public-safety tool. The union objected on Fourth Amendment grounds only after Internal Affairs pointed the cameras at its own members. The Washington drivers whose plates feed the roughly 400,000 scans MPD's readers log each day get none of the justification, logging, or equal-audit protections the union now says an officer under investigation is owed.

National backlash against Flock

The D.C. fight lands in the middle of a national exodus from Flock contracts. Secure Justice found that more than 90 U.S. cities and counties stopped working with Flock in August 2026 alone, and that more than 200 contracts have been terminated since 2021, meaning nearly half of the departments that ended their Flock relationships did so in a six-week span. Austin, Texas stopped using Flock under resident pressure in June 2025, and Cambridge, Massachusetts; Evanston, Illinois; and Eugene, Oregon followed. DeFlock.org counts at least 153 cities that have rejected Flock by declining to renew or cancelling outright.

Much of the backlash traces to individual officers caught misusing the system. The Institute for Justice has tallied at least two dozen cases in which officers resigned or were arrested for allegedly abusing Flock to stalk romantic interests, and counts 239 known cases of the technology causing problems such as false arrests or stalking. In Milwaukee, officer Josue Ayala was charged in February 2026 with one count of misdemeanor misconduct after audit data showed he searched one person 55 times and another 124 times through the department's Flock network. One of the detectives who had investigated Ayala, Tehrangi Chapman, was himself later arrested for using Flock to track two people and secretly installing a GPS tracker on one person's vehicle.

The Wisconsin Examiner reported that the Milwaukee department's own Flock search records showed Officer Josue Ayala searched one victim 55 times and the other 124 times.

In Stow, Massachusetts, officer Jason Rogers faced termination in August 2026 for running Flock and other police-database queries against a person he knew with no legitimate law enforcement reason, and Stow removed its last Flock reader and terminated its Flock relationship as a direct result.

Flock has moved to blunt the criticism. In August 2026 the company announced it would require every customer to adopt an Audit Assistance tool that flags abnormal search behavior by an individual officer, a mandate set to take effect by the end of 2026, and it moved to cut its standard data retention from 30 days to seven. Government action followed. Florida's Department of Transportation cut Flock camera permits on the state highway system on August 31, 2026, citing reports of misuse and data-privacy concerns; Texas Governor Greg Abbott froze state funding for the devices; and Tempe, Arizona ended its Flock contract on August 26, 2026. At the federal level, Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, opened an investigation into Flock's data-collection policies, and Senator Bernie Sanders pledged to introduce legislation to halt Flock and similar companies.

See also

• Flock Safety