Menasha, Wisconsin officer Cristian Morales used department's Flock system to track ex-girlfriend's car

On October 9, 2025, Menasha, Wisconsin police officer Cristian Morales, 31, used his department's access to the Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader network to run five searches for vehicles belonging to his ex-girlfriend, with whom he had broken up the previous month. According to the criminal complaint, two searches were logged at 9:13 and 9:17 a.m. and three more between 9:52 and 9:54 a.m., all listed as a "lookup" with the reason field marked "welfare" and no case number attached. Morales was off duty and made the searches on his personal phone from his home in Appleton; the data showed networks spanning between roughly 15,000 and 92,000 individual cameras were queried, indicating a state- or nationwide search rather than a local one.

The ex-girlfriend told Appleton police she suspected Morales had used Flock to check whether she was where she had told him she would be, and an investigator's review of his account confirmed the five searches. When confronted, Morales told the investigator he knew the searches were wrong but said "desperation, and bad judgment, combined with a lack of sleep" contributed to his decision. Morales had previously been forced to resign from the Outagamie County Sheriff's Office in 2024 over performance problems before Menasha hired him eight months later.

Updates

2026-01-07 — Officer arrested and charged with felony misconduct in office [1][2][3]

Appleton police arrested Morales and he was charged in Outagamie County with felony misconduct in public office. He was placed on administrative leave, made his initial court appearance two days later with a $10,000 cash bond and conditions barring him from accessing Flock or working as an officer, and resigned from the Menasha Police Department later that month. He pleaded not guilty the following month.

2026-08-17 — Convicted, sentenced to six months in jail [4][5]

Morales pleaded no contest to one count of felony misconduct in office. Judge Mark Schroeder rejected the jointly recommended plea-deal sentence of half that time and instead sentenced Morales to six months in jail and three years of probation, fined him $250, and barred him from working as a law-enforcement officer or accessing Flock. The judge called Morales an "oathbreaker" who abused the tools his position gave him; the victim told the court she continued to suffer from anxiety tied to being tracked.

2026-08-19 — Bid to stay out of jail during appeal denied [6]

Judge Schroeder denied a defense motion to release Morales on his original $10,000 bond while he appeals the sentence, rejecting the argument that the six-month term exceeded typical sentences in comparable Flock-misuse cases. Morales remained in custody serving his sentence as of this recording.