The Jackson County, Indiana, Sheriff's Office audit flagged 2,055 searches of a single plate with no legitimate justification.
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A former Jackson County Sheriff's deputy is facing criminal charges after an internal audit caught him running the same license plate through a license-plate-reading camera system more than 2,000 times over an eight-month stretch- and allegedly lying about why.
Jackson County Prosecutor Lynsey Fleetwood filed charges Monday against Skylar N. Thompson: Official Misconduct, a Level 6 felony, and Fraud, a Class A misdemeanor.
Shay McAlister
Here's how it came to light. The Sheriff's Office was doing a routine audit of its FLOCK camera system- the kind of automated license-plate-reader network that's become standard in law enforcement- when auditors noticed something odd: one plate, searched 2,055 times between December 31, 2025, and August 2, 2026.
Every single time, according to the probable cause affidavit, Thompson logged the same justification: "City Planning/Traffic Analysis." The problem is that Thompson was never assigned any duties related to city planning or traffic pattern analysis. Prosecutors say he had no legitimate reason to be running that search at all- let alone thousands of times.
Once the Sheriff's Office spotted the pattern, they didn't sit on it. They brought in the Indiana State Police to run an independent investigation and looped in the Prosecutor's Office. Thompson was terminated and is now the one facing charges.
Prosecutor Fleetwood didn't mince words about what's at stake: officers get access to sensitive systems and investigative tools because the public trusts them to use that access for actual law enforcement work- not for whatever this was. Her office says it has a no-tolerance approach when that trust gets broken, no matter who's wearing the badge.
Shay McAlister
As always, these are allegations at this stage. Thompson is presumed innocent unless and until a court says otherwise.
What's notable here isn't just the misconduct- it's the audit trail. FLOCK systems and similar license-plate-reader networks log every search, which is exactly how this got caught. It's a reminder that the same surveillance infrastructure raising privacy questions nationally also creates a paper trail when it's misused internally.
Shay McAlister
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