TL;DR: Body-camera footage released through a public-records request and published by 404 Media on July 6, 2026, shows a Monroe County Sheriff's deputy in the Florida Keys, identified as Lamar Roman, using two law-enforcement surveillance tools to track down a woman he had met while working a security detail on the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey. He pulled her vehicle information from DAVID, Florida's DMV database for law enforcement, then added her license plate to an Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) hotlist so camera networks would ping him in real time. He then gave chase in his cruiser at 70 mph on a two-lane highway, crossing the double-yellow line to pass trucks and nearly causing a head-on collision when a northbound pickup had to veer off the road to avoid him [1]. The case is the clearest recent demonstration that the ALPR infrastructure sold as "public safety" has no check on an individual officer using it to pursue a private citizen.
What the Body Camera Shows
The footage, obtained by 404 Media through a Freedom of Information Act request, captures a sequence that began on a Hollywood set and ended at 70 mph on US-1. Roman had met the woman while assigned to a security detail for the AppleTV+ production, catcalled her on set, and asked for "her full name and Instagram details," according to 404 Media's account of the records [1].
From there Roman leaned on the same tools every Florida deputy carries. He ran her name or vehicle in DAVID, the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database restricted to law enforcement, then added her plate to an ALPR hotlist, a category that turns fixed and mobile license plate cameras into real-time informants that flag an officer's phone whenever her vehicle passes one [1]. 404 Media described a second, separate "powerful license plate tracking database" that Roman used to find her location and intercept her, though the records 404 published do not name the operator [1].
Once he had her position, the body-cam shows Roman accelerate to 70 mph on a two-lane Keys highway, pass a dump truck in a no-passing zone, cross the double-yellow line to overtake a second truck and then a third, then "almost cause a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision," according to Roman's own statement to investigators quoted by 404 Media [1]. Roman flicked on his lights and sirens and pulled the SUV over.
"I Knew That When I Put [Her into DAVID]..."
The same 404 Media piece cites internal investigators' notes that capture Roman's own framing of what he had done. He told them he had seen the woman "as a 'shiny thing,'" and conceded the lookups were improper: "I knew that when I put [her into DAVID], I'm like 'fuck' and that's why I stopped right after and nothing else" [1].
Roman's admission goes to the heart of the policy problem. The DAVID database and the ALPR hotlist are designed so any officer with a login can run them. The system has no automated flag for misuse. There is no audit limit that says "you've looked up the same private citizen six times this week, something is off." The only review is whatever a supervisor happens to check, or whatever surfaces when a complaint or a pursuit is already on tape.
This is the same gap that showed up a year earlier, when 404 Media's reporting on the Flock Safety-style plate-reader network revealed officers running tens of thousands of lookups with no nexus to a criminal investigation. The Federal audit track is behind, not ahead, of the abuse.
Public Since March
This is not the first public account of the case. 404 Media's piece references earlier reporting out of South Florida on the same Monroe County records [1]. The pattern of an ALPR-and-DMV lookup chain directed at a particular person was on the public record months before the July 6 body-cam release.
What the July 6 FOIA drop adds is the footage itself. Watching an officer's cruiser view makes the rest of the record land differently. The earlier reporting described suspicion. The body-cam turns it into incontestable fact: a sworn officer with access to the state's most powerful vehicle-lookup tools, using them against one private citizen for personal reasons, then driving in a way that nearly killed an oncoming driver.
Why This Pattern Matters Outside the Keys
Florida is not the only state where these tools are standard issue. The plates themselves are scanned by ALPR cameras at scale across the country, with Flock Safety alone reporting roughly 20 billion plate reads per month across 5,000 plus communities [2]. Cities have been canceling Flock contracts in waves since 2024 over separate abuse and data-sharing concerns [2].
The combination is the part that breaks containment. Once an officer puts a private citizen's plate on a hotlist, every plate-reader camera that reads her vehicle becomes a tip line routed to his phone. An officer who wants to keep tabs on a particular person does not need to tail them. The cameras do it for him. That infrastructure is the same plate-reader wave that has triggered a separate legislative push in Minnesota, Colorado, and Kentucky to require warrants for plate-reader queries, and a separate class-action in California over data sharing practices [3][4][5].
The Roman case sits beside all of those without resolving them. It demonstrates the abuse mode that the warrant bills are trying to prevent. Even where state-level guardrails exist, an officer typing a name into a DMV-law-enforcement database on his own recognizance is typically caught only if the query is later sampled. The failure here was not technological. The failure was procedural.
What to Watch
The state response. Watch whether the Monroe County Sheriff's Office publishes the full internal-affairs finding, and whether the Florida Department of Law Enforcement opens its own review. A signed, public IA report is the cleanest answer to the question of whether any discipline followed the March reports.
The plate-reader cameras. Watch whether the vendors named in the broader Flock and Vigilant ecosystems tighten their hotlist audit trails in response to this kind of case. The pattern of "no audit log until a FOIA surfaces the footage" is the policy gap that lets the next Lamar Roman through.
The legislative window. Watch the Minnesota, Colorado, and Kentucky warrant bills. Cases that put real faces to the abstract surveillance question are the ones that move votes, and Roman's body-cam footage is an unusually clean exhibit for any legislator trying to make the case that a warrant requirement would change behavior.
Sources
- 404 Media, Jason Koebler: “Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her With a License Plate Reader” (July 6, 2026)
- Flock Safety Cancel Wave: 30 Cities Drop ALPR Surveillance Contracts (State of Surveillance)
- Minnesota ALPR Privacy Bill HF 4205 Targets ICE and Metro Surge (State of Surveillance)
- Colorado SB 26-070: Flock ALPR Warrant Bill (State of Surveillance)
- Flock Safety Class Action Filed in California Over Federal Data Sharing (State of Surveillance)