Rep. Tim Burchett urged Americans to back his federal surveillance legislation Sunday after a viral video showed Wisconsin police holding two innocent people at gunpoint based on an outdated automated license plate reader alert. “Support my bill. Call your Congressman,” Burchett wrote on X, responding to country singer John Rich, who had reacted to the video by writing: “We better outlaw FLOCK systems before someone loses their life. This is insanity.”
What Actually Happened in Wisconsin
The incident occurred August 6 on Interstate 94 in Waukesha County. According to CBS 58’s report, a Flock Safety camera flagged a vehicle as connected to a Milwaukee homicide investigation involving an armed suspect. Minutes later, Brookfield police conducted a high-risk stop, ordering the vehicle’s occupants out at gunpoint, before investigators determined they were not the suspects police were looking for. Milwaukee police had already cleared the vehicle from their investigation but had not removed the alert from the Flock system.
The Driver’s Own Account
The vehicle’s driver, identified in reporting as Amber Newell, described the experience directly to FOX6 Milwaukee. “I haven’t been asleep since this has happened,” Newell said, according to a report on the interview. “Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns.” She described weighing whether to call her mother during the stop: “My momma is like my go-to person, I wanted to call her so bad yesterday, but I’m like, if I make a sudden move, it’s gonna be over, it’s going to end my life.”
How Both Police Departments Responded
Both Brookfield and Milwaukee police attributed the error to human oversight rather than a flaw in the technology itself. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s reporting, Brookfield Police Chief Christopher Garcia said his officers “did in fact stop the vehicle that was the subject of the Flock alert” and had acted appropriately given the information available to them. Garcia said the alert described a vehicle “associated with a homicide in the City of Milwaukee involving a suspect believed to be armed with a firearm.” Milwaukee police backed Garcia’s account, saying MPD staff had simply failed to remove the vehicle alert from the Flock system after determining it was no longer relevant to their investigation.
The Bill Burchett Is Asking People to Support
Burchett introduced the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, H.R. 9800, on July 21. According to the bill’s official text, the legislation would prohibit federal agencies from purchasing, deploying, operating, accessing, or contracting for automated surveillance systems that identify, track, or record individuals through automated license plate recognition — explicitly naming Flock Safety cameras — facial recognition technology, or biometric identification systems. It would separately bar state and local governments from using federal funds to acquire or operate the same systems, require deletion of improperly obtained data within 30 days, and bar such data from being used as evidence in court.
Why the Bill Would Not Have Prevented This Specific Incident
A significant limitation of Burchett’s proposed legislation is directly relevant to the Wisconsin case: the bill restricts federal purchase, operation, and funding of these systems, but the Brookfield and Milwaukee police departments’ use of Flock technology was a local matter involving local law enforcement funding, not federal agencies or federal dollars. As Burchett has said of the bill’s scope in prior local interviews, localities that fund and operate their own camera networks with their own money remain free to do so under the bill as written — meaning H.R. 9800, even if enacted, would not by itself have prevented the specific data-sharing failure between the Wisconsin departments involved in this stop.
An Advocacy Group’s Sharper Warning
The incident drew a pointed reaction from a Wisconsin civil liberties group. Jon McCray Jones, a political analyst with the ACLU of Wisconsin, told CBS 58: “This is a recipe for disaster where an innocent person may end up shot or killed due to a Flock mess up.” He characterized the underlying problem as a systemic one rather than an isolated mistake: “This was still systemic failure where using Flock technology led to law enforcement in a different jurisdiction, through data sharing, pulling over an innocent person in a vehicle that had nothing to do with the crime they were investigating and pulling a firearm out on them.”
Flock’s Own Response to the Broader Criticism
Flock Safety has pushed back on characterizations of its technology as inherently unsafe or unconstitutional. In a statement responding to a separate Wisconsin community’s decision to defund its Flock contract, the company said: “We strongly disagree with the characterization of Flock as a ‘proven bad actor.’ Flock’s license plate readers capture objective, point-in-time images of vehicles and license plates in public view. They do not use facial recognition, identify individuals, or collect personal information such as names, phone numbers, or home addresses.” The company added that “more than 40 courts across the country have upheld the constitutionality of responsibly deployed license plate reader systems,” and said the platform requires a documented reason for every search and creates a permanent audit trail agencies can review.
Not an Isolated Incident in Wisconsin
The Brookfield stop was not the only recent controversy involving Flock technology in the state. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a former Milwaukee police officer pleaded guilty in June to misusing Flock technology to track someone he was dating — a separate case of misuse, distinct from the data-retention failure behind the August 6 incident, that has contributed to several Wisconsin jurisdictions, including UW-Madison police and Dane County, ending their Flock contracts entirely.
A Documented Pattern Beyond This One Case
Outside research suggests the Wisconsin incident fits a broader, tracked pattern rather than a singular fluke. According to reporting citing the Institute for Justice, the organization has documented at least 26 cases since 2018 of innocent motorists detained at gunpoint or jailed because of automated license plate reader errors, with most of those cases occurring since 2022 — a timeline that roughly tracks the rapid nationwide expansion of networked ALPR systems like Flock’s.
Burchett’s Consistent Messaging on This Exact Issue
Sunday’s post continues a message Burchett has repeated for weeks. On July 23, he posted “Ban FLOCK cameras! Call your Congressman,” and on August 8 — the day before this post — he wrote, “If law enforcement wants to follow all of us get a Dadgum warrant,” tying his opposition to ALPR networks to the same broader Fourth Amendment argument he has made about electronic surveillance more generally.
Where This Leaves Things
As of Burchett’s Sunday post, H.R. 9800 remained an introduced bill without cosponsors, awaiting action in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, while the specific data-sharing failure that led to the Wisconsin incident — an outdated alert left active across jurisdictions — falls largely outside the bill’s federal-funding-focused scope. The episode has nonetheless become a rallying point for Burchett’s broader campaign against automated surveillance networks, even though the underlying failure in this particular case was attributed by both police departments to human error in data management rather than to the technology’s federal funding or deployment.