Apache Junction officer resigns after using readers to find a family member
An Apache Junction officer used license plate reader technology for personal purposes to locate a family member, according to the department. He asked two dispatchers to run the plate, falsely telling them it was for a welfare check.
Pay attention to how this was caught, because it was not by an audit.
Two dispatchers ran the plate as asked. Both felt something was wrong about the request and escalated it to a supervisor. Separately, the officer contacted another agency asking them to perform a welfare check on the same person, and during that call volunteered that he had already used the reader system to find them — which is what corroborated the account.
So the safeguard that worked here was two employees’ judgment and the officer’s own admission. No automated control flagged it. No audit surfaced it. If either dispatcher had simply complied without escalating, there is no obvious mechanism by which this would have come to light.
This matters for the standard argument that policies and access controls make misuse manageable. The policy did not stop the search from happening; a person did, after the fact.
Two agencies, three days apart
This became public on August 10, 2026. Chandler had announced its own misuse finding on August 7 — a different East Valley agency, a different detection path, three days apart.
That is the most direct available answer to “that would not happen here.” It happened twice, in neighboring Arizona communities, in the same week.
Outcome
The officer resigned. Chief Michael Pooley said that had he not resigned, he would have been terminated.