Skylar Thompson Indiana Deputy Charged After 2055 Flock Searches Of One Plate

An Indiana sheriff’s deputy typed the same fake justification into a surveillance database 2,055 times over eight months — and it wasn’t a complaint or an investigation that caught him. It was paperwork. Skylar Thompson, 31, a deputy with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department in southern Indiana, is now charged with felony official misconduct and fraud after investigators say he used the county’s Flock plate-reader network to search one single license plate roughly eight or nine times a day, every day, for 244 straight days.

What the charges say

Charges were filed Monday, August 31, by Jackson County Prosecutor Lynsey Fleetwood: official misconduct, a Level 6 felony, and fraud, a Class A misdemeanor.

The probable cause affidavit lays out the pattern. Between December 31, 2025 and August 2, 2026, Thompson ran one specific plate through the Flock system 2,055 times — not different plates across different investigations. One plate. Every Flock query requires a written justification, and charging documents say he entered the same one each and every time: “City Planning / Traffic Analysis.” Duties, the department says, he never held. Not once in eight months.

Flock cameras read every plate that passes — time, location, direction. Type in a number and the system hands back a map of everywhere that vehicle has been. It’s sold as a tool for finding stolen cars. It works just as well for following one person.

Eight months, one plate

The math is the story. 2,055 searches across 244 days is a sustained surveillance campaign against a single target, not scattered lookups. Whoever owned that car, court papers say, this deputy wanted to know where it was — constantly.

Charging documents do not identify the plate’s owner and state no motive. But the near-identical cases that have surfaced nationwide follow a pattern: a Florida deputy who searched his estranged wife’s plate 717 times, a Texas officer with 2,386 searches, a Sarasota case built on the plate of an officer’s child’s mother. The Institute for Justice has documented more than 100 cases of police misusing plate readers — and that’s only what audits have surfaced. Whether Thompson’s target fits the pattern is the question the court record doesn’t yet answer.

The department’s answer

What broke this case wasn’t the public. On August 14, the sheriff’s department ran a routine audit of its own Flock access logs, and one account lit up. The department referred it to the Indiana State Police the same day, and detectives from the Sellersburg post took over — confirming the numbers, pulling the full audit trail, and handing the findings to the prosecutor.

Thompson is no longer employed by the department, and state police confirm he has been arrested. The prosecutor’s office didn’t hedge: “No person is above the law, especially those entrusted with enforcing it.”

What happens next

Thompson’s initial appearance in Jackson County Circuit Court in Brownstown is expected soon. Indiana communities remain split on Flock itself — some have walked away over privacy concerns, others keep expanding it — but Jackson County kept its cameras and kept running the audits. This time, the audit is what worked.

Every charge is an allegation right now. Thompson is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. This post will be updated as the court record develops: initial appearance date, plea, and any statement from the sheriff’s department.

If one routine audit caught a deputy after eight months — how many departments never run the audit at all?

Sources
Seymour Tribune · WIBC · WLWT · WTHI · ShayInformed · Local12 · WWBL / The Bullet · Fox59

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