The misuse of Flock cameras just ended a Florida police officer’s career, and records show he is one of dozens of officers nationwide who have turned taxpayer funded surveillance tools into a way to track women without their knowledge. Officer Christopher Goodson, 31, of the Haines City Police Department was arrested this week on two felony charges after investigators determined he had been secretly using the department’s Flock license plate reader system to monitor his estranged wife’s vehicle.
According to the Haines City Police Department, Goodson was charged with one count of official misconduct and one count of offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks and electronic devices. Both charges are third degree felonies, per the arrest affidavit.
The case broke open after Goodson’s wife received a text message telling her the Washington Post had reached out about a story on his Flock activity. Goodson then showed up at the home of his supervisor, identified as Lieutenant Carter, and admitted he had been running his wife’s plate through the system. He claimed the searches were his way of keeping tabs on his children while they were with her.
What investigators found went far beyond casual checking. Goodson entered his wife’s license plate into the Flock database 717 times between September 1, 2024 and June 30, 2026, both while on duty and off. The activity spiked hard in the back half of 2025, with 86 searches in August, 280 in September, 72 in October, 104 in November and 68 in December. To justify the searches in the system, Goodson allegedly cycled through false pretenses including wanted person, drug and narcotics, assault and battery, and obstructing police, according to WFLA. His wife was never connected to any criminal investigation and her vehicle was never linked to a crime, the department confirmed. Goodson, who joined Haines City PD in March 2022, has agreed to resign. Police Chief Isaac Jackson called it “an unfortunate incident” in a statement to WFLA.
Goodson’s arrest lands in the middle of a much bigger reckoning over Flock camera misuse inside American policing. A Washington Post investigation found at least 50 documented cases nationwide of officers charged with or accused of misusing license plate reader systems for unauthorized surveillance, with 26 of those cases involving officers spying specifically on wives, girlfriends, exes or women they wanted to meet.
In Milwaukee, officer Josue Ayala secretly used Flock to track his romantic partner 124 times and her ex 55 times before pleading guilty, and the detective who investigated him, Tehrangi Chapman, was later arrested for tracking two people himself and planting a GPS device on one of their vehicles, per CNN.
Georgia has become a hotspot too, with at least 18 officer arrests tied to Flock database misuse across multiple counties, including five former Albany Police Department officers picked up by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in July. In North Carolina, Mooresville officer Elizabeth Snowman was arrested in August after an audit found she accessed Flock 31 times to track her boyfriend’s ex wife, according to ABC News. The Institute for Justice has separately tracked cases involving deputies and detectives in Habersham County, Sumter County and Effingham County, Georgia, all accused of running the same play, misusing law enforcement access to keep eyes on women in their personal lives.
What ties nearly all of these cases together is how they surfaced. Few were caught through proactive department audits. Most only came to light after the women being tracked found out on their own, through a tip, a public records request, or a reporter asking questions, the exact chain of events that took Goodson down in Haines City.
