A former police officer in Texas who is believed to be one of the most prolific Flock misusers in the country used the technology to track his ex-girlfriend and her romantic partners and jeopardized an open manslaughter case because of his misconduct, the district attorney who prosecuted him told USA TODAY.
Zachary Klein, an 11-year veteran of the Lufkin Police Department, was sentenced on Sept. 30 to five years in prison, five weeks after a USA TODAY investigation found he used his agency’s automated license plate reader cameras to monitor individual cars thousands of times.
Klein is one of at least 27 police and sheriff’s office employees across the country who have been arrested, fired, put on leave or placed under investigation to date as a result of USA TODAY’s reporting on widespread misuse of Flock’s technology. He is the first of them to be criminally convicted.
Klein pleaded guilty in Angelina County District Court to 100 felony counts of misuse of official information. Texas Rangers, who conducted the criminal investigation into Klein, found that he used Flock and other law enforcement databases to track the movements of his ex-girlfriend, her family members and other men she had dated for two years.
His case demonstrates the collateral consequences that officers who abuse Flock can inflict on the personal lives of innocent bystanders, including the victims of unrelated cases they had investigated.
It is part of a broader reckoning against Flock across the country that has inspired concerned citizens to attend public meetings in droves, cities and counties to cancel their contracts with the company, and prominent politicians to call for limitations or outright bans on its technology. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cited Klein’s case in late August as part of his decision to forbid local law enforcement agencies from spending state funds on Flock cameras.
Amy Wren, the district attorney for East Texas’ 86,000-person Angelina County, of which Lufkin is the county seat, told USA TODAY that Klein ran more than 25,000 improper Flock searches since July 2024 and threatened people he illegally tracked.
Klein was the lead investigating officer in an intoxicated-manslaughter case Wren’s office is currently prosecuting. That case is now at risk of dismissal, she said, because his actions undermine his credibility as a witness.
“He was stalking people, and they didn’t even know it,” she told USA TODAY. “He has affected at least one significant case in this office that may result in a victim getting no justice because of this.”
Klein, who is incarcerated, could not be reached for comment. Dan Simmons, the attorney who represented him, emphasized that none of the charges against Klein pertain to stalking, threatening behavior or domestic violence. He said he believed Klein’s sentence was “fair and measured.”
“The overriding story that everyone needs to keep in mind is the appropriateness of the Flock camera system,” Simmons said. “They are intrusive of people’s privacy at levels we haven’t seen before. They are almost impossible to monitor and control.”
In response to questions from USA TODAY in August about officer misuse cases, Flock public relations manager Paris Lewbel pointed to recent changes the company made to help agencies identify bad actors, including its “Audit Assistance” feature, which he said will become mandatory for all law-enforcement customers by the end of the year.
“Any officer abuse of our system is completely unacceptable,” Lewbel said in an emailed statement, “and the people that abuse our system should absolutely be held accountable.”
Flock is an “incredible law enforcement tool,” Wren said. It has helped her office find missing children and vulnerable adults and solve aggravated robberies and murders that otherwise might have gone unsolved. It is extremely powerful, she said, but “lends itself to abuse.”
“I think it is smart,” she said, “for people to reevaluate how it’s being used, how we’re going to monitor how it’s being used, so that we can ensure if things like this are happening, we’re catching it immediately, instead of after 25,000 runs.”
How the Misuse Came to Light
Lufkin police launched an internal investigation into Klein after a USA TODAY reporter on Aug. 14 contacted the agency about his pattern of irregular Flock searches.
The news organization’s analysis found that Klein searched six license plates at least 7,396 times from December 2024 to November 2025. One plate he searched an average of 20 times per day during a three-month span.
Lufkin police placed Klein on administrative leave and suspended Flock use across the department during its internal investigation. Chief Travis Brazil also asked Texas Rangers to perform an outside investigation.
Texas Rangers arrested Klein on Aug. 20, six days after USA TODAY’s inquiry.
Their investigation found that Klein had used Flock to track the movements of at least 12 people associated with women he had dated, Wren told USA TODAY. She said he searched at least five more people using TLOxp and the Texas Criminal Information Center, two law enforcement databases that contain information about people’s criminal history, active warrants, vehicle registrations, Social Security numbers, home addresses, phone numbers and more.
A search warrant for his cell phone data revealed that he had searched Google for things like “What is stalking in Texas,” “Is it stalking if the victims don’t know you’re stalking them,” “What’s the statute of limitations for stalking,” “What’s the penalty range for that,” and more, Wren said.
“None of the people that he was watching had any idea that this was happening,” she said. “He knew what he was doing; they did not.”
Klein demonstrated a pattern of using “coercive controls” on at least two women he dated, Wren said. That included allegedly threatening to kill himself multiple times in front of children, threatening to set fire to his ex’s car and threatening one of the men she had dated. One of the license plates he searched most frequently was registered to the man he threatened, Wren said.
Klein denied making the threats in his interview with Texas Rangers, and none of these allegations resulted in charges against him. But Wren said her office obtained video of some of his behavior. She said he admitted using Flock to search people for personal reasons and made a series of excuses to justify the misuse.
USA TODAY obtained a police report from 2021 showing that Klein’s wife at the time called the Angelina County Sheriff’s Office on him. A deputy logged the call as a “disturbance.” The woman told the deputy that he had revved his truck engine at her in his driveway while she hid behind a tree. Similar incidents had occurred throughout their marriage, she told the deputy, but she said had not reported them because she did not want it to affect his job.
According to Wren, Klein’s subsequent dating partner — the woman he primarily surveilled — did not report similar threats either because she did not believe anything would happen, as Klein was a police officer himself.
During its prosecution of Klein’s case, the Angelina County District Attorney’s office obtained a lifetime protective order for the woman, with stalking as the underlying basis.
“He would have emotional swings and he would get very rage-like,” Wren said. “She was concerned for herself and her family members that, if he were to get out of jail, what he might do.”
Audits and Accountability
Klein stopped conducting improper Flock searches in December 2025, when officers across the Lufkin Police Department became aware that their search histories were publicly viewable through public records requests of agencies’ Flock audit logs, Wren said.
That’s the same month that Flock, in response to public scrutiny, began obscuring its audit logs to stop the public from seeing most officers’ names, license plates searched and their stated search reasons.
Still, Wren said Klein continued using TLOxp and the Texas Criminal Information Center for personal reasons through June 2026.
Wren charged Klein on Aug. 21 with 100 felony counts of misuse of official information, each a third-degree felony.
“To be honest with you, it was going to be more,” Wren said. “I wanted it to be a number that signified the significance of what he had done.”
Klein pleaded guilty to all 100 counts on Sept. 30. Judge Todd Kassaw sentenced him to five years in prison, with credit for 42 days served.
Asked why the Lufkin Police Department did not catch Klein’s Flock searches sooner, Chief Brazil said the agency’s prior audits had not drilled down to the search activity of individual users. He noted that Flock use remains suspended across the department.
“Because of the volume of legitimate searches across the department, Officer Klein’s unauthorized searches were not readily distinguishable within the broader departmental activity,” Brazil told USA TODAY in an emailed statement.
“This incident identified a weakness in the department’s previous auditing practices — specifically, the need for greater review of individual-user activity rather than relying primarily on department-wide auditing. The department has taken that lesson seriously and is in the process of strengthening its oversight to provide greater accountability and help prevent similar misuse in the future.”
Asked the same question, Wren said that Flock did not make its Audit Assistance feature available until January 2026 — 18 months after Klein’s improper searches began. Before that, understanding Flock’s audit logs required a more complex data analysis like the one USA TODAY conducted.
With around 60 officers, Lufkin is a relatively small police agency that probably did not have the resources to audit its Flock logs on a regular basis, she said. She noted that Lufkin is far from the only agency nationally that failed to adequately monitor its own officers’ usage.
“I think that agencies just assumed that the searches that were being made were good because we should be able to assume that our officers are doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” Wren said. “Maybe it’s just complacency.”
Misuse Cases Across the Country
Klein is one of 27 police and sheriff’s office employees in seven states who have been arrested, fired, put on leave or placed under investigation because of an analysis by USA TODAY and TC Palm — part of the USA TODAY Network — of more than 80 million Flock searches spanning three-and-a-half years and more than 6,300 agencies. He is the first of them to be criminally convicted.
In each of those cases, reporters flagged the officers’ questionable search patterns before their own agencies did.
Including Klein, at least 10 police officers and sheriff’s deputies in Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York and Texas have been arrested as a result. Eight of them have been charged in court. That includes Fort Pierce police officer Josepher Crutchfield and Pinellas County Sheriff’s deputy Karl Gwynne in Florida, whom prosecutors charged in September.
Crutchfield pleaded not guilty to four felony counts of abuse of computer access, court records show. He is accused of using Flock to track his ex-girlfriend at least 382 times from February to June 2025. A judge has since granted that woman a restraining order against Crutchfield for stalking.
Gwynne — who is accused of using Flock to surveil “a woman he was interested in dating,” Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said at a Sept. 30 news conference — is charged with four counts of accessing a computer device without authority and one count of official misconduct, all felonies. An arrest affidavit says he improperly searched for the same individual at least 352 times across four law enforcement databases, including 300 Flock searches. Gwynne pleaded not guilty.
Another officer, Melissa Smith of the St. Charles County Police Department in Missouri, was charged on Sept. 10 with two misdemeanor counts of misuse of official information by a public servant. She resigned from the department during an internal investigation into her Flock use prompted by a USA TODAY reporter’s inquiry. The department discontinued its Flock use soon after. A plea hearing in her case is scheduled for Oct. 29.
At least 10 of the 27 officers flagged by USA TODAY’s analysis have resigned or been fired, including James Keinard of Braselton Police Department in Georgia. Keinard searched the same three tags at least 891 times from September 2023 to October 2025, audit logs released through public records requests show.
Sierra Carroll, a former school resource officer for the Houston County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, has been fired, Sheriff Matt Moulton told USA TODAY. The sheriff’s office had previously suspended Carroll after USA TODAY inquired about her repeated searches of several individual plates, including one she searched at least 4,018 times from May 2024 to August 2025.
Carroll is charged with one misdemeanor count of improper use of captured license plate data; she has not entered a plea.
The police department in Eastpointe, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, imposed “severe discipline” against one officer for using Flock for personal reasons and found that a second officer’s Flock use violated department policy. The officers, Joshua Ignace and Joseph Rebar, remain employed. The Eastpointe City Council voted 4-1 to end its contract with Flock on Sept. 15, citing the misuse cases as one factor.
“I know they’re a really valuable tool, but at this point I feel there’s a lot of issues surrounding Flock cameras,” Mayor Michael Klinefelt said at the Sept. 15 meeting. “There’s not really an infrastructure in place to make sure that they’re used appropriately.”
In Florida, officer Chayse Hatfield of the Vero Beach Police Department and deputy John Finnegan of Indian River County Sheriff’s Office are on leave after a TC Palm reporter asked about their repeated searches of individual plates.
Officers Keinard, Ignace, Rebar, Hatfield and Finnegan have not been charged with any crime relating to their Flock use.
Internal investigations at Vero Beach Police Department, Indian River County Sheriff’s Office and several other agencies continue.
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