As another Pinellas County deputy is arrested for alleged misuse of Flock cameras, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri still says the technology isn’t to blame.
Deputy Ronald Scott was arrested Thursday morning. Gualtieri said at a press conference Thursday afternoon Ronald Scott allegedly used the Flock camera database to track his estranged wife.
Gualtieri said Scott and his wife were separated, pending a divorce. Scott allegedly searched for his wife and her boyfriend over 100 times, starting on Valentine’s Day of this year.
In 2019, Scott was reprimanded for being “intoxicated” and “creating a public disturbance in an establishment,” prompting the manager to ask him to leave.
Gualtieri has repeatedly said Flock cameras can’t track people, but in this case, he said Scott used them to find out where the couple had been.
“Scott made these queries to learn the locations that his wife and her boyfriend had traveled to or to identify their vehicles and obtain other private information,” Gualtieri said.
Gualtieri—who is heading a nationwide pro-ALPR campaign—said the technology isn’t the problem.
“I mean, you know, the people that want to not listen and want to make it about ALPR are going to do that,” Gualtieri said at the press conference. “I can’t control that. … But they’re wrong.”
He said he only caught Scott’s alleged misuse because of a new auditing tool released by Flock that is more comprehensive than the audits his team used before.
Gualtieri said he’s not surprised that his agency didn’t catch the misuse before, but he’s confident that all previous instances of ALPR misuse have been caught.
A previous audit prompted by an inquiry from TCPalm reporter Jack Lemnus resulted in the arrest of former Pinellas Deputy Karl Gwynne, who allegedly searched the ALPR system for a love interest 300 times.
Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney Bruce Bartlett declined to prosecute Gwynne in an Oct. 29 court filing.
“Current Florida statutory provisions do not address the wrongful conduct reported,” the filing reads. “This office will seek to have the legislature correct this situation in the next session.”
But Gualtieri is confident that Bartlett has enough information to prosecute Scott.
“There are some concerns, and some—I’ll say it mildly—disagreements about interpreting the elements of the statute, but I’m comfortable we can work through it,” Gualtieri said.
St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway told St. Petersburg City Council this morning that one of his former officers could also face criminal charges for misuse of ALPRs.
Cases like Scott’s and Gwynne’s aren’t the only things riding on how the legislature decides to regulate ALPRs.
Pinellas County Commission recently declined to vote on a proposal to remove ALPRs from county roadways. Instead, they’ll wait for the state legislature to regulate the cameras during their next legislative session.
It’s not clear who will be most influential in the legislature’s decision. Flock alone has dumped over $2 million into lobbying for their technology, and Gualtieri previously told the Pinellas County Commission he’s been traveling across the country to advocate for ALPRs.
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This article appears in Nov. 05 – 11, 2026.
