City of Greenfield police chief Jay Johnson is facing felony misconduct charges after allegedly ordering the installation of a department-owned surveillance camera outside his personal home while in the midst of divorce proceedings with his wife. According to the criminal complaint, Chief Johnson was explicitly told by Greenfield’s city attorney he could not install a public-property pole camera for personal surveillance at his residence, but not only did Chief Johnson ignore this — he reportedly told one of his employees to keep the installation “low key” and discreet.
While the camera was part of a wider surveillance network for public safety, Johnson is accused of stealing this camera from the public and diverting it for personal reasons: off-book, without public notice, oversight, or a legitimate public safety purpose. Some may write this off as, “Well, someone stole something minor on the job — and while it’s bad, it’s not that big of a deal.” But that mindset misses the frightening potential behind the badge.
A single camera seems small, until you realize it could track the movements of an entire household or be specifically weaponized against his wife. Now imagine that multiplied across hundreds or thousands of officers with access to license-plate readers, surveillance networks, facial-recognition systems, and cell-site simulators.
A pattern of misuse
Chief Johnson isn’t the first — and likely won’t be the last — to misuse police surveillance tools for personal reasons:
- In 2024, Lee Nygaard, the former police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas, used Flock automatic license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track his ex-girlfriend’s vehicles 228 times over more than four months — and even followed her and her new boyfriend in his police car.
- Former Lt. Ryan Terrell of North Charleston, South Carolina, admitted to using city-owned surveillance cameras to monitor his wife, whom he suspected of having an affair. Terrell was not fired but simply demoted.
- Michael Steffman, the former police chief of Braselton, Georgia, was arrested for allegedly using ALPR systems to stalk and harass multiple private citizens who were not being investigated for crimes.
These aren’t isolated rogue cops — they are people who held leadership positions of trust and power, and they used that power irresponsibly. In all cases, the targets of their surveillance were private individuals, often women, with no connection to criminal investigations. Imagine how many everyday law enforcement officers, not in leadership positions — like Jarmarus Brown of Orange City Police Department in Florida, who reportedly ran his girlfriend’s and her family’s plates over 100 times in a seven-month span — are misusing surveillance tools to abuse.
This pattern of law enforcement being untransparent and unaccountable for their use of surveillance technology — combined with a booming industry of privacy-killing tools handed to officers daily — is a recipe for disaster, especially for people, mostly women, who are the romantic interests of law enforcement officers. Recent data suggests that law enforcement officers commit domestic violence at a higher rate than civilians, not to mention the sexual and physical abuses committed by law enforcement against sex workers — especially trans and gender-fluid sex workers — which are worsened when officers have unregulated tools that disclose their exact location.
Little is known about when and how Flock cameras are used
Across Wisconsin, a vast camera network is tirelessly photographing and identifying vehicles and license plates — storing that information on a central platform that can be searched at will by law enforcement. With just a few keystrokes, including a “reason” for the search, officers across the state can uncover where a vehicle has been and who it belongs to. The network, known as Flock, logs these searches, a feature Flock Safety’s CEO says “underscores accountability” and allows for increased oversight. — from a 2025 article by Wisconsin Examiner reporter Isiah Holmes.
Over 200 Wisconsin law enforcement departments use Flock cameras or automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), according to Flock audit data reported on by Holmes on Wisconsin law enforcement's usage of ALPRs. The data revealed that from January to June 2025, the Wauwatosa Police Department conducted nearly 1,900 ALPR searches, with the sole justification being “investigation.” What kind of investigations warrant no further description — and why did the vast majority remain unidentified by name, date, or outcome?
Investigation of what exactly?
- Were officers searching the license plates of innocent wives, girlfriends, past Tinder dates, exes, or women who ghosted them?
- Were officers mapping the location of sex workers whom they could later coerce into sex under threat of arrest?
- Were they assisting ICE with immigration activity and helping to deport community members?
If they conducted nearly 2,000 anonymous searches for actual law enforcement investigations, why didn’t they elaborate in the description, as they did for the other 8,472 uses? Answers we may never know — and that’s a problem.
What’s even more alarming is that Wauwatosa ranks fifth in Flock-camera usage in Wisconsin; that likely means there are tens of thousands of license plate searches by law enforcement officers across the state — tracking people’s cars and location for reasons we will never know. And that’s just license plate readers. How many times have Wisconsin law enforcement officers used facial recognition, Stingrays (artificial cell-site simulators to collect phone data), or other surveillance technologies for personal gain or to subvert the law?
More oversight is necessary
This proves the point: we need mechanisms in place to always know when law enforcement is using tools that violate our privacy. We understand the need not to disclose usage publicly during active investigations — that makes sense. However, there is a significant amount of middle ground between protecting law enforcement investigations and departments like Wauwatosa, which conducted nearly 2,000 unexplained license plate searches in six months.
What we need is:
- Annual public reporting of all surveillance tool use by law enforcement agencies across the state — including how many searches were conducted, their stated purpose, and how many resulted in formal charges or convictions.
- Notice to prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges whenever surveillance tools are used in a criminal case — ensuring checks and balances in the court process.
- Clear, written policy guidelines for officers on when and how surveillance technology can be used — including mandatory logging of who accessed what data and when.
Surveillance tools — license-plate readers, cameras, facial recognition, cell-site simulators — give law enforcement almost supernatural power. In the wrong hands, that power becomes a weapon against privacy, dignity, and sometimes safety — especially for people who already face social and legal marginalization: women, immigrants, queer people, sex workers.
This isn’t about punishing officers for doing their jobs. It’s about preventing abuse before it happens. I truly believe that most officers will never abuse the surveillance technology given to them for personal gain. However, with thousands of officers statewide, even if just a small fraction misuse these tools, it can amount to hundreds or thousands of violations. That’s not acceptable.
We don’t know whether there is widespread misuse of surveillance technologies in greater Wisconsin or Milwaukee County, because there is far too little transparency regarding when and why Wisconsin law enforcement agencies use surveillance tools.
Power corrupts — and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If we are serious about protecting both civil liberties and public safety, we must design systems of oversight that hold law enforcement accountable — before the next private camera appears outside someone’s home, or the next ALPR scan turns into a personal vendetta.
We deserve transparency. We deserve accountability. And most of all, we deserve protection from surveillance in the name of public safety, not being exploited for personal gain.
