Who Watches the Watchers? MPD Internal Affairs Detective Charged with Crime He Just Investigated

What do we do when the people trusted to protect others use surveillance technology to stalk the women in their own lives?

What do we do when the officer responsible for investigating that misconduct is later accused of misusing the exact same technology?

And what do we do when we zoom out beyond one city and realize this isn't an isolated incident, but part of a pattern stretching across Wisconsin and the rest of the country?

These aren't hypothetical questions anymore. They're questions Wisconsin has to answer.

On July 8, 2026, 51 year old Milwaukee Police Detective Tehranghi Chapman was charged with misconduct in public office after allegedly conducting 20 unauthorized searches through the Milwaukee Police Department's Flock automated license plate reader system over the course of six years. According to prosecutors, Chapman used the department's access to Flock to monitor the movements of someone who was not the subject of a criminal investigation.

That story would have been disturbing enough on its own. What made it even more alarming was Chapman's role inside the department.

Chapman worked in Internal Affairs and had been involved in the investigation of Milwaukee Police Officer Josue Ayala, who ultimately pleaded guilty after using the very same surveillance technology to stalk his former partner.

Think about that for a second. The detective helping investigate an officer for abusing surveillance technology was allegedly abusing that same surveillance technology himself. If that doesn't raise questions about the culture surrounding these systems, I don't know what does.

Unfortunately, Milwaukee isn't the only place where this has happened.

Less than a week after the allegations against Chapman became public, two Racine police officers and a Racine County sheriff’s deputy reportedly came under investigation for allegedly misusing Flock's automated license plate reader system.

Earlier this year, Menasha Police Officer Christian Morales was arrested after his former girlfriend accused him of repeatedly using his Flock account to monitor her location.

In Kenosha County, Sheriff's Deputy Frank McGrath resigned after an internal investigation concluded that he had knowingly and repeatedly misused restricted law enforcement databases. According to the investigation, McGrath used the Flock network along with a squad car tracking system to remotely monitor another deputy he had been dating.

Add those cases together and, in less than a year, Wisconsin has seen seven law enforcement officers either charged with, found to have committed, or publicly accused of misusing a single surveillance technology.

Read that sentence again.

We're talking about one surveillance tool.

We're not talking about facial recognition systems. We're not talking about cell site simulators that impersonate cell towers. We're not talking about social media monitoring software or fusion centers or predictive policing algorithms. We're talking about automated license plate readers. If one technology is producing this many scandals in such a short period of time, it's worth asking whether the problem is bigger than the individual officers who got caught.

Because that's the other uncomfortable reality.

These are only the cases we know about.

Law enforcement agencies didn't voluntarily publish these stories to demonstrate transparency. Most became public because someone filed a complaint, an internal investigation occurred, a journalist requested records, or criminal charges were eventually filed. It's entirely possible that there have been other instances of surveillance misuse that never resulted in discipline, never reached the media, or were simply never discovered.

When you start seeing the same type of misconduct repeated across multiple departments, involving officers with different ranks and different backgrounds, it's hard to argue that we're dealing with a handful of bad apples. At some point, you have to ask whether the system itself is creating the conditions for abuse.

I think it is.

We've built a policing model where thousands of officers have access to extraordinary amounts of personal information with remarkably few barriers preventing misuse. In many departments, searching surveillance databases is as simple as typing in a license plate number and providing a brief justification. Once that information is available, an officer may be able to reconstruct where someone has driven, when they visited certain places, and who they regularly spend time with.

Officers are human beings.

Human beings have ex partners. Human beings have messy divorces, jealous relationships, family conflicts, personal grudges, and unhealthy obsessions. We understand this reality well enough that we don't give ordinary citizens unrestricted access to databases containing sensitive information about strangers. We recognize that power without accountability invites abuse.

So why would we assume police officers are somehow immune to those same temptations?

The problem isn't that every officer is abusing these systems. Most probably aren't. The problem is that we've designed surveillance programs around the assumption that every officer can be trusted with extraordinary access while building very few safeguards to verify that trust.

One of the clearest examples comes from Wisconsin Examiner reporter Isiah Holmes' investigation into how police agencies use Flock. Holmes found that nearly 20,000 searches in a five month period were justified with nothing more than the single word "investigation."

Investigation of what?

That word tells the public almost nothing. It doesn't distinguish between a homicide investigation, a missing child, a stolen vehicle, or an officer searching for information about someone they know personally. Even if 90 percent of those searches were entirely legitimate, that still leaves roughly 2,000 searches where the public has no meaningful way to understand why the database was accessed. Transparency matters because vague justifications make accountability almost impossible.

That should change.

No surveillance search should be approved with a one word explanation. Departments should require meaningful case specific justifications that can later be audited. If an officer knows someone else will eventually review their search history, they're far less likely to misuse the system for personal reasons.

The allegations against Detective Chapman exposed one of the biggest weaknesses in our current system. Internal Affairs exists to investigate officer misconduct, yet one of its own investigators now stands accused of abusing the very technology he was responsible for policing. That doesn't necessarily mean every Internal Affairs investigation is compromised, but it does demonstrate why departments cannot be expected to police themselves forever.

The watchers cannot be the only people watching the watchers.

Independent third party audits should become standard practice for every department using surveillance technology. Those audits should regularly review search histories, identify unusual patterns, and publicly report misuse without waiting for a scandal to expose it.

We also need to rethink how long surveillance data is stored.

Automated license plate readers become significantly more invasive when they retain months or years of location history. If someone isn't under investigation, there is very little public safety justification for indefinitely storing detailed records of where they have traveled. Shortening retention periods to fifteen days for people who are not connected to an active criminal investigation would dramatically reduce the opportunity for long term stalking while still allowing departments to use the technology during legitimate investigations.

Access itself should also become more limited.

Not every officer needs immediate access to every surveillance database. Just because someone carries a badge doesn't mean they should automatically possess the ability to search years of location history whenever they choose. Most searches should require a warrant or documented supervisory approval. Emergency situations should have exceptions, but those exceptions should be narrow, carefully documented, and subject to later review.

Departments could also establish specialized privacy trained units responsible for conducting surveillance searches on behalf of investigators. Those units would operate under detailed standard operating procedures, receive additional privacy training, maintain comprehensive audit logs, and document every request they fulfill. That approach would create another layer of accountability while ensuring legitimate investigations can still move quickly when necessary.

The goal isn't to make policing impossible.

The goal is to make surveillance accountable.

Too often these conversations get framed as a false choice between privacy and public safety, as though protecting constitutional rights somehow prevents police from solving crimes.

Good policing depends on public trust, and public trust disappears when people begin believing surveillance tools are just as likely to be used against an officer's ex-girlfriend as they are against a violent criminal.

Wisconsin still has an opportunity to get ahead of this problem.

We're early enough in the widespread adoption of these technologies that meaningful reforms are still possible. We don't have to wait until every department has built massive surveillance networks before deciding what the rules should be. We already know what happens when access is broad, oversight is weak, and accountability depends on whether someone gets caught.

The lesson from the past year isn't simply that six officers allegedly or admittedly abused surveillance technology. The lesson is that six different cases exposed weaknesses that existed long before those officers ever typed a license plate into a database.

If we only punish individual officers while leaving the system unchanged, we'll be having this same conversation again in a few years. The names will be different. The departments might be different. But the story will sound exactly the same.

We don't just need to watch the people being watched.

We need to watch the watchers.