Wisconsin Police Searched a Veteran's Car in Flock More Than 100 Times After He Filmed Them at Work

On May 4, 2025, Napoleon Jones, a U.S. Navy veteran, was in a private parking lot in the city of Sussex (Wisconsin) when he noticed an officer from a neighboring county conducting a traffic stop. As he tells it, what was happening “seemed wrong to him,” and he exercised his right to record the episode on his phone, keeping a safe distance and not interfering.

An Unlawful Stop and Arrest

The law was on Jones's side, but that did not stop Waukesha County Sheriff's Deputy Brandon Sheehorn. Having finished the first stop, he turned on his flashing lights and pulled over Jones himself — on the pretext that his temporary plate, displayed in the rear window, was “unreadable.” Jones refused to produce his driver's license, citing the unlawfulness of a stop on private property. In the video, the officer can be seen opening the car door and dragging Jones out.

He was detained “for resisting and obstructing,” held for five hours, and released without a single citation or charge. An internal memo reviewed by Reason shows that a supervisor told Sheehorn almost immediately that the stop had been unlawful and that he had no right to demand documents.

One Photo and a Hundred Queries

The next day Jones filed a complaint and then hired a lawyer. It was the attorney, Nate Cade, who spotted something odd: the sheriff's office's response included a photo of his client's white BMW taken by the Flock Safety system on May 30, 2025 — 25 days after the incident. Further review turned up more than a hundred queries for the white BMW in the system in the weeks after the arrest. Some of them were made by Sheehorn himself — an obvious conflict of interest. Under questioning, the officers claimed a lieutenant had ordered them to search for the car “in connection with” Jones's complaint.

Jones himself admitted he was stunned: he had assumed the system of cameras and plate recognition was meant “for criminal cases.” There was no Flock camera in the parking area where the arrest took place, and he was not a suspect in any offense. In July 2026, Jones expanded his lawsuit to include the officers who had run his car without the lawful reason required by the county's user agreement.

Automated license-plate readers were already stirring growing outrage in the U.S. over their invasion of privacy. This case is a reminder of how easily such tools are turned against citizens: if lawfully filming an officer results in weeks of surveillance, it is hard to count on other constitutional rights being safe from the same kind of retaliation.

Source: Hacker News