Cop Arrested for Flock-Stalking Exposes Another Oversight Failure

A McHenry County, IL, cop, aptly named Copp, was reportedly arrested for misusing Flock:

Copp used the Flock license plate readers to track the ex-boyfriend 140 times; 86 of those alleged uses occurred while Copp was off duty, prosecutors said. Copp also allegedly called the man and told him to have no contact with a woman with whom they both had been romantically involved.

Confirmed instances of abuse are always interesting because they can tell us what it actually looks like in audit files. Unsurprisingly, it looks exactly as you’d expect.

While we don’t (at this time) have audit logs from Prairie Grove, we do have network logs from nearby Illinois agencies. Any area-wide searches done should appear on the Prairie Grove IL PD agency page. They do.

The summary at the top of that page reads:

We have seen a total of 2,993 searches for this agency, performed by 2 persons over 600 days between 8/7/2024 and 3/30/2026.

That “2 persons” is doing a lot of work. Exactly one operator name survived Flock’s redaction — “M. Goi.” Active on a single day in August 2024, using one case number. The other 2,984 searches are stripped to ***: Flock deleted every operator name and every license plate. The “2 persons” could be two or twenty.

This makes it nearly impossible to detect abuse. Nearly.

Of those 2,993 searches, roughly seven in eight — about 2,600 — carry the reason “Training” or “test” and all were conducted between June 4 and November 2, 2025. Each search touched around 470 networks. The reason, over and over: “Training.”

Prairie Grove conducting its training on live data should be an immediate red flag; a live national surveillance database shouldn’t be receiving “training” or “test” queries. Every search should be for a valid reason, and that reason should appear in the logs — at least that’s what we’re being told by Flock and police departments.

The Non-Criminal Report on this site attempts to track use of the Flock system for purposes other than criminal investigations. Some searches in that report are civil matters or things like traffic planning, but most of the entries are “Training” and “test.”

That report has been there for a while. But more importantly, over 450 networks had been receiving stripped-down log files showing that Prairie Grove IL PD was running “training” on live data — week after week, hundreds of times a month, from (at least) June into November 2025. Roughly seven of every eight searches the agency made.

The last “training” search was November 2, 2025. Three days later, on November 5, Prairie Grove placed Copp on administrative leave. After that, the “training” stops, and what’s left is ordinary police work — stolen autos, hit-and-runs, citizen assists. Including, on January 13, 2026, a cluster of searches tagged “Stalking — Copp Internal Issue.”

For the five months the “training” ran, none of the agencies for those 450-plus networks raised the alarm. Neither did Flock.

The reporting doesn’t say what moved Prairie Grove to look. The department offers only that its investigation began “in November”; the McHenry County Sheriff says his office had no involvement; Flock says nothing. And the one victim whose account is public didn’t surface it either. By his own January 2026 petition, an investigator contacted him — he was told about the surveillance, not the other way around — and his request for an order of protection was denied:

Early this year, a man sought an order of protection against Copp, claiming that Copp had looked up the man’s license plate using a license plate reader system 178 times between September and January, court records show. The man’s request for an order of protection against Copp was denied.

Prosecutors also date Copp’s misconduct to February 2024. Even 2,600 “training” hits over five months is only the part we can see.

This should have been easy to catch. Seven of every eight searches an agency runs, labeled “training,” month after month. It would have been easier still had Flock not deleted Copp’s name and his victim’s license plate number from the logs — deletions that make it hard to detect prolonged surveillance and possible stalking.

That hundreds of departments failed to see or act on evidence they had is bad. But it’s also the inevitable result of the “transparency” model Flock sells, where the only party who can see the complete picture is the vendor with no incentive to look.

The product works as designed: it’s surveillance watching everyone except who runs it.