Two kids sat in the back seat of a black Kia Seltos this week, unaware their ride had turned into a kidnapping. In Lake City, a domestic dispute that started inside the police department’s own lobby ended with a man named Branch Stamper driving off with a woman’s two children still buckled in — kids he had no legal or biological relationship to. Officers pulled cell phone location data and a hit from the FLOCK license plate reader network, tracked the Kia to NE Lake Drive, and had both children back with their mother within hours. Stamper was booked into the Columbia County Detention Facility. The Department of Children and Families opened its own investigation into the case.
It’s the kind of story becoming almost routine in Florida and across the country: a network of automated cameras, quietly reading license plates as cars roll by, turning a frantic search into a fast recovery.
The same technology has cracked far darker cases. In Utah, three women were murdered and their vehicle went missing from the crime scene. Word went out to law enforcement across the Four Corners region. When Durango, Colorado police got a tip the suspect vehicle might be heading their way, they ran the plate through their Flock system and found it had already passed through Farmington and Aztec, New Mexico. Officers located a man matching the suspect’s description — 23-year-old Ivan Miller — in the middle of the night. He was carrying a handgun and a knife. A follow-up interview tied him to all three killings.
More Kids Brought Home
- Pingree Grove, Illinois — License plate data helped identify and arrest a suspect on charges including aggravated kidnapping and predatory criminal sexual assault of a child.
- Wake County / Charlotte, North Carolina — A child reported missing out of Henderson was tracked across county lines using Flock cameras. The suspect, 44-year-old Candice Deyoung, was arrested in Charlotte and the child recovered.
- Merrillville, Indiana — A 3-month-old baby abducted near Plymouth was found roughly two hours later after a camera caught the suspect’s blue Cadillac. She was arrested in a grocery store parking lot; the infant was returned to the parents.
- Hinckley, Ohio — A 10-year-old girl taken during a custody exchange was located quickly after officers ran plate alerts through the camera network.
- New Paris / Preble County, Ohio — A missing juvenile out of Texas was found in a passenger seat during a traffic stop triggered by a Flock alert.
- Galt, California — Police say a kidnapping suspect was tracked down in just five minutes using the same technology.
- Belmont County / Lucas County, Ohio — An endangered missing girl was reunited with her family after a plate-reader hit led to a traffic stop.
- Central Florida — Perhaps the grimmest example: when 13-year-old Madeline Soto disappeared in 2024, plate reader data proved her mother’s boyfriend, Stephan Sterns, had lied about dropping her at school. He’d actually driven the opposite direction. That same data helped investigators narrow the search area where her body was eventually found. Sterns was convicted of her rape and murder.
More Killers Caught
- Rose Hill, Kansas — Cameras installed just weeks earlier caught a vehicle tied to a Georgia murder suspect wanted for killing 50-year-old Kerry Binns. U.S. Marshals made the arrest in a neighboring town while the suspect was driving for work.
- Houston, Texas — After a bank robbery, surveillance footage captured a plate. Deputies found the suspect still holding the demand note and the stolen cash.
- New Jersey / Tennessee — A Jefferson County, Tennessee man wanted on a child rape charge was flagged by a camera in Fanwood, New Jersey and arrested on the spot.
- Oshkosh, Wisconsin — U.S. Marshals located and arrested a homicide suspect months after a fatal shooting, using leads generated by the camera network.
- San Diego — The city’s own surveillance report for 2025 shows the technology helped advance 361 cases, led to 269 arrests, recovered 12 firearms and $3.1 million in stolen property, and assisted in roughly a third of the city’s homicide investigations.
Why Bradford County Should Be Paying Attention
There’s no getting around the math: these cameras are finding kidnapped kids, cracking murders, and recovering stolen property at a scale a small department’s manpower alone couldn’t match. For a rural county without the staffing to run down every stolen-vehicle report or every parental abduction, that kind of force-multiplier matters. If a child goes missing off a back road near Lawtey or Brooker, having that camera data available could be the difference between hours and days.
But the same technology that reads a getaway car’s plate reads yours, too — every time you drive past one, logged, timestamped, and stored. And that ledger has already been abused, badly, by the very officers trusted to use it responsibly:
- A Milwaukee officer used the system to track his romantic partner’s location 124 times, and her ex 55 times.
- A Kansas police chief searched his ex-girlfriend’s plate 164 times and her new boyfriend’s 64 times.
- A Georgia deputy allegedly ran the plate of a woman he was having an affair with over 1,600 times.
- A North Carolina officer was charged after allegedly using the system 31 times to track her boyfriend’s ex-wife, most of it logged under bogus “motor vehicle infraction” justifications.
- Georgia alone has seen at least 19 public employees implicated in misuse this year, including a police chief charged with stalking and five officers arrested in a single sweep.
- In one Arkansas case, a misread digit on a plate turned an innocent driver’s stop into a high-risk police encounter.
The backlash has gotten loud enough that a sitting congressman in Tennessee wants to ban the cameras outright — while a congressional candidate in the same district was arrested for shooting four of them down. A West Virginia man charged with cutting cameras loose has become something of a folk hero online. It’s not just fringe anger; plenty of ordinary people simply don’t like the idea of a permanent record of everywhere they drive, sitting in a database that “requires an active case number” to search — as departments insist — but that clearly isn’t always followed.
Finding the Middle Ground
The fix, if there is one, is probably regulation rather than removal. Most departments already say they audit searches and require a case number tied to every query, and states like Washington, Virginia and Connecticut have passed laws forcing data to be purged after 21 days instead of Flock’s standard 30. Stronger, mandatory audit trails, real penalties for personal use, and a hard cap on how long footage is retained would go a long way toward keeping the tool aimed at the job it’s actually good at: finding missing kids and catching people who hurt them, not settling personal scores.
Used the way it’s supposed to be used, the record speaks for itself — over 1,000 missing people found nationwide and counting. Misused, it’s a stalking tool with a badge behind it. Bradford County residents weighing whether to support cameras locally would do well to ask not “should we have them,” but “who’s watching the watchers.”