Two Pinellas Deputies Arrested for Misusing License Plate Databases to Track Women They Were Interested In

The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office arrested two of its own deputies on felony charges Wednesday after investigations found they abused law enforcement databases, including the agency's automatic license plate reader system, to track women they were romantically interested in. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri named the deputies as Travis Stanton and Karl Gwynne at a 1 p.m. news conference, laying out findings that land in the middle of an already heated fight over the license plate cameras mounted around the county.

Gualtieri said Gwynne searched the sheriff's office database, which pulls from every brand of automated license plate reader the agency uses, roughly 300 times to track the vehicle of a woman he was interested in. When asked why, Gualtieri said Gwynne told investigators he simply wanted pictures of the back of her car. Stanton faces accusations of inappropriate conduct toward a 17-year-old high school student. The sheriff said Stanton told the girl he'd gotten a "hit" on her driver's license in the plate reader system, a claim Gualtieri said never actually happened.

The arrests did not come from an internal audit. They came after a reporter started asking questions the agency initially brushed off.

How the searches came to light

A user account in Flock's audit logs, tied to one of the deputies, had searched two license plates a combined 670 times between February and September of this year, each one logged with the reason "FLOCK API SEARCH." A reporter with TCPalm, Jack Lemnus, flagged the pattern to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office on Aug. 20.

The agency's first answer, given Sept. 21, was that the searches were tied to ongoing investigations and that "all queries were valid." Just weeks earlier, on Sept. 2, Gualtieri had told reporters there were no active investigations into Flock database abuse by his deputies. It took further review, including a look at the agency's other plate reader vendors beyond Flock, before the sheriff's office told the reporter it had in fact identified misuse. That admission came the same morning the office announced the arrests.

Pinellas is not the only department caught this way. Lemnus's review of publicly accessible Flock search logs has led to 27 officers disciplined across multiple agencies for misusing the database, many of them accused of tracking ex-partners. He has said that in nearly every case, the agency had no idea the abuse was happening until someone outside the department went looking. Flock's audit logs are only made public at an agency's own discretion, and the company has since moved to redact officer names and plate numbers from those logs, which Lemnus said will make outside scrutiny like his almost impossible going forward.

What Gualtieri has said about the technology

The sheriff has spent weeks defending the cameras publicly, arguing they take motion-activated still photos rather than continuous video and that his office has used plate readers in some form for about 20 years. That defense is harder to square with Wednesday's arrests, which show the technology being turned not on suspects but on private citizens a deputy found personally interesting.

The sheriff's office has not said what charges Stanton and Gwynne face beyond describing the arrests as felony charges for improperly accessing sheriff's office systems, nor has it said whether either deputy remains employed. It also has not detailed what discipline, if any, will follow for supervisors who signed off on the Sept. 21 statement calling the flagged searches valid.

The sheriff's office has not said whether it will now audit its own logs for similar patterns without waiting for a reporter to ask first. That question, more than the two arrests themselves, is likely to shape how much residents trust the cameras watching their streets going forward.

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Header photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)