A New Bedford police officer stood in a Massachusetts courtroom and confirmed that she had run her former girlfriend’s license plate through the Flock Safety camera network. She explained that she uses the system every day as part of her job. The judge extended an abuse prevention order against her for six months and barred her from possessing a firearm.

That is the whole story in three sentences, and every part of it should get your attention.

Not because one officer allegedly misused a database. Because the system was built so that a single officer could do it, and nobody would know until the woman being tracked happened to hear about it from an internal affairs investigator.

If a camera network put your car somewhere at a particular time, and that fact is now sitting in a police report or a prosecutor’s file, the New Bedford case is not somebody else’s news. It is the reason your lawyer should be asking for the audit log.

What Happened in New Bedford

Officer Emily Pacheco is the subject of an ongoing internal affairs investigation. Her former girlfriend testified that the department contacted her after her plate turned up in the Flock system an unusual number of times. Pacheco’s lawyer has not commented publicly.

New Bedford suspended its use of Flock on August 11 while it reviews the program. The department said recent technology audits prompted internal investigations and that one officer was placed on administrative leave. It has used the system since 2024.

New Bedford is not an outlier. Salem, Framingham, Cambridge, and now Littleton have pulled back from Flock. Nationally, more than eighty communities have cancelled or deactivated contracts.

This Is a Pattern, Not an Incident

Two weeks before the New Bedford hearing, The Washington Post published an investigation identifying at least fifty officers nationwide charged with or accused of misusing license plate reader systems. Flock’s network was involved in most of them. In roughly half the documented cases, the target was a wife, a girlfriend, an ex, or a woman the officer wanted to meet. One Georgia police chief searched his former girlfriend’s plate, and her teenage daughter’s, hundreds of times.

Then there is the immigration side. The ACLU of Massachusetts and local coalitions audited Salem’s Flock data and found that about 95 percent of searches came from outside agencies. In one two-month stretch in 2025, searches of Salem’s data listed “immigration” or “ICE” as the reason more than two hundred times. Public audit data shows New Bedford, Milford, and Canton logging searches tied to Enforcement and Removal Operations. Massachusetts communities passed sanctuary policies. The camera network routed around them.

On August 13, Flock announced changes. Every search must now carry a

number. Retention drops from thirty days to seven. An auditing tool flags abnormal search patterns, and agencies get more control over data sharing. Those are real improvements. They also tell you exactly what the system looked like during the years your plate was already in it, which is the period most pending cases were investigated.

The Law Massachusetts Defense Lawyers Are Working With

Six years ago, in Commonwealth v. McCarthy, the Supreme Judicial Court became the first appellate court in the country to address whether ALPR use is a search. The Court upheld the search there, because four cameras on two Cape bridges did not paint a detailed enough picture of the defendant’s life. But it said something that matters far more now: with enough cameras in enough locations, historic ALPR data would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and would constitute a search under Article 14 and the Fourth Amendment.

The SJC drew a line and declined to say exactly where it sits. Then the technology walked straight past it. Four bridge cameras in 2020 is not a hundred thousand networked cameras in 2026, feeding a searchable national database with agencies in other states running queries on Massachusetts drivers.

Massachusetts still has no comprehensive ALPR statute. Bills imposing retention limits, warrant requirements, and a suppression remedy have been filed session after session and have not passed. Federal courts are split, with a Virginia district court rejecting the aggregation argument the SJC credited. That case is on appeal.

Which means the law here is being made right now, in suppression hearings, by defense
lawyers who know what to ask for.

What Our Attorneys Are Watching

“Before I practiced law, I was a police detective, so I know how these entries actually get made. An officer types a reason into a field at the end of a long shift, and years later that field is the most honest witness in the courtroom. Every Flock query leaves a record. Who ran it, when, and why they said they were running it. I have tried more than 150 cases, and a database log is among the best cross-examination tools I have ever been handed, because it fixes the sequence. An officer testifies to a clean investigative progression. The audit trail tells you whether the search came before the suspicion or produced it.”

Joseph F. Hennessey, Dhar Law, LLP

“We spent twenty years litigating whether the police could attach a tracker to a car. That fight is over, and we lost the framing. Every car is now the tracker, the Government never had to touch the vehicle, and the operative check on abuse is a private company’s terms of service, revised by press release. McCarthy told us that aggregation is the constitutional event, that enough data points stop being observations and become a portrait of a life. The Commonwealth has not caught up to its own precedent. Until it does, the check I want on that portrait is the one that has worked for two centuries: a warrant, a judge, and a lawyer who knows how to cross-examine the officer who ran the query.”

Vikas S. Dhar, Managing Partner, Dhar Law, LLP

If Camera Data Is in Your Case, These Are the Questions That Change Outcomes

Most clients do not know ALPR evidence is in their file. It rarely appears under that name. It shows up as an officer who happened to be looking for a particular vehicle, or a stop that came together a little too neatly. Here is what we ask:

Was the query logged, and what reason was given? A search entered with no case number, or a stated purpose that does not match the investigation, is a suppression issue and a credibility issue at the same time.

How many times was your vehicle captured? Volume matters under McCarthy. A handful of hits is a different constitutional question than a pattern of life reconstructed across months.

Who ran the search? If the query came from an out-of-state or federal agency using a Massachusetts department’s data, the sharing itself may violate local policy, and that opens a second line of attack.
Did the camera data create the stop, or justify it afterward? That sequence decides cases.

Are there immigration consequences? If an ALPR search fed an immigration referral, the criminal case and the immigration exposure are one problem, not two. We handle both under one roof.

If your case involves a stop, a surveillance record, or a search you were never given a real explanation for, call us before your next court date. Suppression arguments are built on records that get purged, and Flock’s retention window is now seven days.

If You Are the One Who Was Tracked

There is a second person in every one of these stories, and she usually has no idea it is happening. She notices that an ex knows where she was. She cannot prove it. Then an internal affairs officer calls.

If that describes you, a protective order is the floor, not the ceiling. Facts like these can support a civil rights claim and a criminal complaint, and they are strongest when pursued together and early, while the logs still exist. Our firm litigates police misconduct and civil rights cases alongside our criminal defense practice, which means the same team that knows how to read an audit log knows how to sue over one.

The Real Question

Are we building the surveillance system we actually want, or inheriting the one that got installed while nobody was looking?

New Bedford’s cameras went up in 2024. The audit that caught the problem came in 2026. In between, a network of cameras recorded every driver in the city, and the only reason anyone learned how that data was used is that one woman went to court and asked.

Do not wait for an audit to tell you what happened in your case. Ask now. Call Dhar law today (617) 880-6155, or contact us here.