Milwaukee Cop's Data Entry Error Leaves Wisconsin Woman Held at Gunpoint Twice in One Week

Amber Newell was driving on Interstate 94 in Waukesha County on Thursday, August 6, when Brookfield police boxed in her vehicle with guns drawn. A Flock Safety license plate camera had flagged her car as connected to a Milwaukee homicide investigation, according to FOX6 Milwaukee. Video from the scene shows a passenger holding both hands out the window in compliance while officers surrounded the vehicle on a highway that had ground to a halt.

Brookfield police did what they're trained to do. They called the Milwaukee Police Department to coordinate the arrest. MPD's answer: never mind, we don't need that car anymore.

The vehicle alert should have been pulled from the Flock system once the investigation moved past it. Nobody did that. Newell and her passengers were released on the spot.

Brookfield Police Chief Christopher Garcia said his officers acted consistently with the information they had at the time. That's true, and it's also the problem. The information they had was wrong, and it wasn't Brookfield's fault.

Milwaukee police told FOX6 the failure was a personnel error, not a technology malfunction. Staff simply never removed the stale alert. The department declined an on-camera interview and hasn't said publicly what it's doing to stop this from happening again.

This was Newell's second gunpoint stop in the same week. She told FOX6 that Milwaukee police pulled her over Monday, guns drawn again, towed her car, and let her go without explanation or charges. "It was very embarrassing because after they put us in cuffs, they walked us to the car, I don't know what's going on, I'm scared, all you see is people in they cars recording," Newell said.

By Thursday's stop, the fear had compounded. "I haven't been asleep since this has happened," Newell told FOX6. "Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns." She said she wanted to call her mother during the stop but was too afraid to move. "If I make a sudden move, it's gonna be over, it's going to end my life."

This isn't an isolated glitch in Wisconsin. Mandatory reported that in July, a car reviewer walking out of a Kohl's store was surrounded by police with guns drawn after his Range Rover was mistakenly flagged as stolen by the same camera network. Two Milwaukee Police Department employees have also faced criminal prosecution for using Flock cameras to stalk private citizens, according to Mandatory's reporting.

Breitbart News has separately documented a pattern of law enforcement misusing the technology. In one case, Braselton, Georgia police chief Michael Steffman allegedly used Flock's license plate database to track his ex-girlfriend, Marci Bakely, a single mother in Jefferson, Georgia, according to audit logs compiled by the watchdog site Have I Been Flocked.

The core problem here isn't the camera. It's the humans running the database behind it. Flock's system does exactly what it's built to do: scan plates and flag matches against a list somebody typed in. When that list doesn't get updated, the system keeps flagging a car that's no longer relevant to any investigation, and officers who trust the alert have no way of knowing it's stale.

Flock cameras have helped solve real crimes, and Brookfield officers responding to a homicide-linked alert on a highway had every reason to treat it as serious. Nobody's suggesting police should ignore flagged plates.

But the flip side is just as real. A tool that automatically triggers gunpoint stops needs an audit trail with teeth, not a manual "someone remembers to delete it" process. Newell had a gun pointed at her twice in five days over a data entry task nobody finished.

Milwaukee police have not said whether the officer or employee responsible faces any discipline. They also haven't detailed what safeguards, if any, will now require alerts tied to closed or narrowed investigations to expire automatically rather than sit in the system indefinitely. Newell has not indicated whether she plans legal action, but the pattern of Flock-related stops in Wisconsin alone, stacked against confirmed misuse cases in Georgia and criminal charges against Milwaukee police staff, raises the question of who's actually auditing this system before the next innocent driver gets a rifle pointed at their windshield.