A Fired Florida Deputy Put a Woman's Plate on a Camera Watchlist So He Could Pull Her Over

A sheriff's deputy in the Florida Keys ran a woman through restricted police databases, put her license plate on an automated camera watchlist, and used the alerts to stop her on the highway with no legal cause. He admitted it on camera to his own agency's detectives. The cameras he abused are the same class of plate-reading network that Cooke County has been paying to install along local highways.

Lamar Roman, 28, met the woman on Feb. 3, 2026, while working an off-duty security detail on Big Pine Key for the Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey, according to Monroe County Sheriff's Office records reported by Local 10 News in South Florida. She was a 27-year-old extra. In interview footage the sheriff's office released, later published by the documentary channel Explore With Us, she described a uniformed man who called out about "models on set" as she stepped off the crew shuttle, asked for her name and Instagram, and kept returning through the day even as coworkers steered her away. She told detectives she could not tell at first whether he was a real deputy or an actor playing one.

She also recounted the comment that stopped sounding like a joke. "He was like, I'm going to find you. I'm going to pull you over," she said in the recorded interview.

Investigators found he did exactly that. Sheriff's office records show Roman looked the woman up in the agency's master name index, used what he found to open her file in DAVID, Florida's restricted driver-information database, and viewed her address, photo, signature and vehicle records. He had no investigative purpose. Asked in the recorded interview why he ran her, Roman answered that he did not need to, and that he knew it was wrong as he did it.

Then he reached for the cameras. Roman entered her plate into the county's license plate reader "hot list," the alert system agencies use to flag stolen cars and wanted suspects. Monroe County's readers sit along U.S. 1, the only highway through the Keys. On Feb. 19 the system alerted him that her car was on the road, according to the arrest reporting.

His patrol car's dash camera recorded what happened next. The footage, first reported by 404 Media, shows Roman passing a dump truck in a no-passing zone at more than 70 mph, crossing a double yellow line around a second truck, and nearly striking an oncoming white pickup, which veered off the roadway. He caught up to the woman's SUV and turned on his lights.

"Did you have a legal reason to pull her over?" a detective asked him in the released interview. "No," Roman said.

The woman recognized him at the window. She asked how he knew it was her. She told detectives he answered: "I told you I'd find you and pull you over."

The sheriff's office fired Roman and arrested him on March 10 on three counts of unlawful use of a computer system, third-degree felonies under Florida law. He has not been convicted. On July 1 he entered a pre-trial intervention agreement, Local 10 reported from court records: prosecution is deferred for two years while he completes 100 hours of community service, continues therapy, stays away from the woman and pays about $1,700 in investigative costs. Complete the conditions and the charges are dismissed. Break them and prosecutors can resume the case.

The cameras Roman used are made by Insight LPR, a Fort Worth company whose own materials claim more than 10 billion plate scans across more than 1,000 American cities. They do the same job as the Flock Safety readers in Cooke County: photograph every passing plate, store it, and answer questions about where a car has been, or send an alert the moment it passes again.

That second feature is what turned a film-set encounter into a traffic stop. A plate network's value to police and its danger to everyone else come from the same fact: it never stops watching, and any officer with access can put a name into it. The distance between that power and a Feb. 19 in the Keys is policy. Who gets access, what gets logged, whether anyone reads the logs.

Those are live questions here. Cooke County has paid Flock Safety $83,550 for its cameras, and its written usage rules were still unpublished when GvilleTX examined the program in July. Sheriff Ray Sappington has defended the system as "a snapshot, not a video." In August, Marietta, Oklahoma, 25 miles north of Gainesville, canceled its own Flock cameras after learning the company retains data indefinitely; until that week its cameras had been sharing plate data with the Cooke County Sheriff's Office. Drivers can check whether their own plate has been searched in Flock's network, and community-reported camera locations appear on the GvilleTX road map.

What ended Roman's career was not a complaint from the woman. She did not know most of it had happened until detectives told her. The databases logged his queries, the cameras logged his alerts, his dash camera logged his driving, and his own agency assembled the records and handed him to prosecutors. The audit trail worked because someone read it. Whether the same review would happen here is not something the public can check: as of GvilleTX's July report, Cooke County's camera policy remained unpublished.

In the released footage, the detective who explained to the woman what Roman had done paused over the license plate readers. "It's upsetting to me as a cop," he said.

Editor's note: Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.

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