A Revere police officer ran his ex-girlfriend through the city’s license plate camera network more than a dozen times. He did it on four separate occasions. He also pulled her up in the state criminal records system.
His department looked at it and cleared him.
Then somebody looked again, and in August he served three days without pay. He is back at work now.
His name is Michael Tiso, and his case is the clearest picture anyone in Massachusetts has been given of what an automatic license plate reader actually is once it is installed in your town. Not a camera that catches stolen cars. A searchable history of where your vehicle has been, sitting behind a login that a few hundred people in your county already have.
What the records show
Tiso and the woman dated from March 2021 to October 2022. What happened after that is genuinely contested, and we will come to it, because it matters more than the headline version suggests.
What is not contested is the search activity. According to the internal investigation, Tiso accessed the Flock automatic license plate reader system and city cameras more than a dozen times across four occasions, and separately looked her up in the Massachusetts criminal records database. Revere police concluded he had violated department policies and the use protocols governing both systems.
A complaint reached the department in December 2025. The investigation went up in January. He served the suspension from 24 to 26 August 2026, roughly eight months after the complaint landed.
Three days.
The part that should worry you more than the three days
Tiso was initially exonerated.
That is the detail to sit with. The searches were in the logs the whole time. Every Flock query is recorded, with the searching officer, the timestamp, and the stated reason. The system was built to be auditable. And on the first pass, his superiors looked at the record and found nothing wrong.
It took a second look to produce a sustained finding.
Which raises the obvious question about every other department running this technology in Massachusetts. An audit trail is only a safeguard if somebody reads it and is willing to act on what it says. If the first review of a documented pattern of searching an ex-partner comes back clean, the log was not the control. The log was just a file.
His account, which deserves to be here
Tiso has an explanation, and it is not that he was checking up on an old girlfriend for the sake of it.
“The only reason why I was running those is because she was actively following me, harassing me, following me to details, following me to my house,” he said.
The background supports part of that. Tiso had a restraining order against her. She had also filed restraining orders and criminal complaints against him over a period of years, so the paper runs in both directions. In June she was charged with violating an abuse prevention order, and those charges were later dismissed.
This was not a case of an officer idly tracking a stranger. It was two people with a long and bitter history, each of whom had been to court about the other.
We are not naming her. She is a private person, the criminal charge against her was dismissed, and the story here is about who can search a surveillance database and under what controls. Her name adds nothing to that.
Tiso’s account also shifted. He initially denied using Flock to track her, and later said he had been assisting another officer with a police report. She had gone to the State Police to say she believed he was monitoring her car’s movements.
Why “she was following me” is not the answer people think it is
Take his version entirely at face value. Assume he was being harassed and was frightened, and that everything he says about her conduct is true.
He still had a remedy, and it was not the one he used. An officer who believes he is being stalked can report it, seek a criminal complaint, and have another officer investigate. Tiso had a restraining order already, which means he had been in front of a judge and knew the process.
What he did instead was use a police surveillance system to check on a private citizen’s location, in a dispute in which he was personally the other party. The policy violation is not that his motive was sinister. The violation is that he was the wrong person to be running those searches at all, whatever his reason, because there is no version of that in which he is a neutral officer performing a police function.
That is precisely what a use policy is supposed to catch, and it is why “I had a good reason” is not a defence to it.
Revere’s police chief, Maria LaVita, put the standard plainly after the case: “we must ensure that each and every search is connected to a legitimate, lawful purpose.”
What he had already been disciplined for
This was not his first entry in the file. In 2020 he was disciplined twice, drawing suspensions in the range of one to five days. One matter involved conduct described as unbecoming, along with neglect of duty. The other concerned a failure to respond to incidents in accordance with procedure.
None of that has anything to do with cameras. It is context for how a three-day suspension reads. It is not the sanction handed to someone whose record was otherwise spotless.
He is not the only one
If this were a single officer in a single city, it would be a personnel story. It is not.
Officers in New Bedford, in Stow, and in Lynn have all been accused of misusing plate reader systems for personal surveillance. Several officers across Massachusetts are under investigation for alleged misuse of Flock technology.
Four departments, four separate accusations, one technology. That is a pattern, and it appeared within a couple of years of these cameras arriving.
The reason is not that police officers are unusually dishonest. It is that the tool is unusually easy to misuse and unusually good at what a person misusing it would want. Before Flock, an officer who wanted to know where an ex-partner had been driving would have had to follow her, which takes time, risks being seen, and looks exactly like what it is. Now it is a plate number in a search box, from a desk, in about four seconds, and the only trace is a log entry that somebody has to bother to read.
Convenience changes behaviour. It always has.
The court ruling that landed at the same time
Two days before Tiso’s case became public, a Suffolk Superior Court judge ordered the Massachusetts State Police to disclose where its Flock cameras are and to release the audit logs showing which officers had run searches, with plate numbers redacted. The ACLU of Massachusetts had been pursuing that for five years.
The two stories are the same story. One shows what happens inside the system. The other is about whether anyone outside the system is allowed to see it.
Until that ruling, the State Police position was that the public could not be told where the cameras were or who had been searching them. The Tiso case is the argument against that position, made concrete. The only reason anyone knows what he did is that a complaint forced a look at records that would otherwise have stayed inside a building.
We covered the ruling and what it means for public records separately.
What Flock actually is, and why the Revere case is not local
Here is the piece that most residents have not been told, and it changes how the Revere story reads.
Flock cameras are not a closed municipal system. Agencies can opt into a national lookup capability, which means an officer running a search is not necessarily limited to the cameras in his own city. Departments across the country that have opted in can search each other’s data.
So the question is not only whether your town bought cameras. It is which other agencies can see what your town’s cameras recorded, and whether anyone in your town has audited that.
The company has been moving, and quickly, in response to exactly the kind of case Revere produced. Flock cut its default data retention from thirty days to seven, after what was described as dozens of police abuse cases, and made search auditing compulsory. Holding data longer now requires tying it to an active case number as evidence. In June 2025 it added automatic keyword blocks for immigration-related and reproductive-health-related search terms. In January 2026 it gave agencies a single toggle to switch off federal sharing entirely.
Companies do not make that many concessions that fast unless they are losing customers.
Massachusetts towns are walking away
They are. More than two dozen cities and towns in the state have opted out of the technology or stopped using it.
Cambridge cancelled its contract after the cameras had already gone up. Brookline paused a potential rollout. Watertown ended its use. Abington, Ayer, Groton and Southbridge have all terminated contracts or suspended use.
Nationally the trend is sharper. More than twenty jurisdictions moved to cancel Flock contracts in July 2026 alone, the highest total in a single month since the activist group DeFlock started mapping the company’s installations in 2021, and more than fifty cities and counties cut ties over the course of the year.
The ACLU of Massachusetts has published a community toolkit for residents who want their own town to do the same.
What the Revere case actually proves
It does not prove that plate readers never solve crimes. They do. Departments can point to stolen vehicles recovered and suspects located, and there is no honest argument that the technology has no law enforcement value.
What it proves is narrower and harder to answer.
The safeguard everyone points to is the audit log. Every search is recorded. And in Revere, the searches were recorded, and the record was reviewed, and the first review cleared him. The safeguard worked exactly as designed and produced the wrong answer, because a log is a document, not a decision.
The second thing it proves is about proportion. More than a dozen searches of a private citizen across four occasions, plus a criminal records lookup, by an officer with prior discipline, in a dispute in which he was personally involved, produced three days without pay and a return to duty.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether that is enough. What is not really arguable is that it is the sanction which now sets the expectation for every other officer in the Commonwealth who is wondering what happens if they run a plate they should not.
There is no Massachusetts law on any of this
People assume a technology this invasive must be governed by a statute written for it. In Massachusetts it is not.
There is no comprehensive state law setting out who may run a plate search, what reason they must give, how long the data may be kept, whether it may be shared across state lines, or what the penalty is for looking up someone you are in a personal dispute with. What exists instead is a patchwork: each department’s own use policy, whatever terms the vendor sets by default, the public records law, and after this month a Superior Court ruling about disclosure.
That is why the Revere outcome was a three-day suspension rather than anything more serious. He broke a department policy. A policy is an employment rule, and the sanction for breaking one is discipline. Lawmakers on Beacon Hill are weighing limits on police access, but as things stand the rules that governed Tiso’s searches were written by his own employer and enforced by his own supervisors, who cleared him the first time.
The vendor has effectively been legislating in the meantime. When Flock cut its retention default from thirty days to seven, that was a company changing a setting, not a legislature changing a law, and the company can change it back.
The question nobody has answered: what did POST do?
Massachusetts built an oversight body for exactly this situation, and it has been almost entirely absent from the coverage.
The Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission was created in the 2020 police reform law and operates under G.L. c. 6E. It certifies every officer in the state, and it can suspend or revoke that certification. It also maintains a public database of disciplinary records.
Departments do not get to decide whether POST hears about a case. Under the reporting rules, an agency must notify the commission of credible misconduct complaints within two business days of receiving them, and the reportable categories are broad: any incident resulting in discipline, any internal affairs investigation, and allegations of prohibited conduct including policy or procedure violations, conduct unbecoming, and untruthfulness.
Every one of those boxes is arguably ticked here. There was an internal affairs investigation. It produced discipline. The finding was a policy violation. And the officer’s account of what he was doing changed, from denying he used Flock to track her to saying he had been helping another officer with a report, which puts the question of untruthfulness on the table whether or not anyone chose to pursue it.
What POST can do with that is a separate matter, and the standards are not the same going in as coming out. The commission must revoke certification in a narrow set of cases: a felony conviction, certification obtained by fraud, or a revocation in another jurisdiction. None of those applies.
But it may revoke in a wider set, and one of the discretionary grounds is repeatedly sustained internal affairs investigations. Tiso now has a sustained finding from 2026 on top of two disciplinary matters from 2020, one of which involved conduct described as unbecoming.
Whether the commission has taken any of this up, we do not know. Its published database contains final decisions on certification, suspension and revocation, and it excludes complaints that were unfounded or not sustained. A three-day municipal suspension is not by itself a certification action, and there is nothing to indicate one has been opened.
That is worth stating as an open question rather than an accusation. The point is simply that in Massachusetts there is a body above the department with the power to look at a pattern rather than a single incident, and a case involving a sustained finding of misusing both a surveillance network and the criminal records system is the kind of thing it exists for.
How to find out whether someone ran your plate
This is the question readers actually have, and after this month it has a better answer than it did in August.
Every Flock query generates a log entry: the searching officer, the agency, the time, the plate, and a stated reason for the search. That is the record the ACLU spent five years trying to get out of the State Police, and that a Suffolk Superior Court judge has now ordered disclosed, with plate numbers redacted.
For a municipal department, the route is the Massachusetts Public Records Law, G.L. c. 66, § 10. You can ask a police department for its audit logs, its use policy, its contract with the vendor, and its retention settings. You will likely have a fight about redactions. You are unlikely, after a Superior Court ruling rejecting a blanket withholding, to be told the entire category is secret.
Questions worth putting in writing to your own department: what ALPR system is in use and under what contract; how long data is retained; whether the agency has opted into national lookup so that out-of-state agencies can search its cameras; how many people hold search credentials; what reason codes officers must enter; how often the logs are audited, by whom, and what happened the last time an audit flagged something.
The Revere case says the last of those is the one that decides whether any of the rest matters.
What to watch next
Revere says it has installed a new audit tool that flags unusual or suspicious search patterns, and has issued a formal use policy for the system. That is the correct response, and it is worth asking the obvious follow-up: what triggers a flag, who reads the flags, and what happened to the reviewer who cleared these searches the first time.
Beyond Revere, three things are moving at once. The State Police disclosure ordered by the court will show, for the first time, where cameras are and how often they are being searched. The Legislature is weighing limits on police access. And towns keep voting to unplug.
If you want to know whether your own town has these cameras, that is a public records question, and after this month’s ruling it is a harder one for a department to refuse. Ask what system is in use, how long data is retained, whether the agency has opted into national lookup, who has search credentials, and how often the logs are audited.
That last question is the one the Revere case says actually matters.