Kristopher Jackson resigned from the Goodyear Police Department in October before the internal affairs inquiry was finished. Chief Brian Issitt said that had Jackson not quit, he would have been fired for multiple policy violations, including abuse of authority, violating body camera rules and dishonesty.

The case began on Jan. 4, when Jackson was dispatched to a call from a woman who said her ex-boyfriend had entered her home, taken her cat and threatened to send partially nude photos of her to her workplace. According to the report, Jackson sat with the woman and walked her through questions about protective orders. She told him she did not want a formal report that day because she believed the cat might be returned, and asked whether she could contact him if it was not back by Jan. 8.

About 23 minutes into the call, the report states, Jackson cleared his throat, reached up and turned off his body camera while the woman was still describing calls and messages from her ex-boyfriend. He did not clear the call for another 40 minutes and never filed a report.

The same day, Jackson ran the woman's name through ACJIS, the state criminal justice database, five times, and once more on Jan. 10. Between Jan. 4 and Feb. 8, he searched her license plate 36 times, including 14 times in a single day, with some searches occurring outside his normal working hours. He also looked up the ex-boyfriend's plate several times.

The department's internal affairs unit discovered the pattern in July during a routine Flock audit that flagged Jackson's queries. Flock cameras, which photograph and log passing license plates, are increasingly common in Arizona communities, and the audit trail records which credentials were used for each search.

"When you access the database, it's fairly easy to be able to figure out what credentials, what username, what password was used to get into the database," said Michael Gennaco, a police practices expert who also serves as an independent auditor for Flock systems.

Glendale police reviewed whether Jackson illegally accessed criminal history records and filed no charges. In an interview with a Glendale detective, Jackson said he checked the woman's plate repeatedly to make sure she was safe, and that he had called her and visited her home to check on her. A forensic examination of his city-issued phone found no calls between the two before Jan. 31, when the woman left him a voicemail saying her cat had been killed. The report also notes that Jackson gave two different explanations for running her name through ACJIS.

"The police department found not only that this officer inappropriately accessed a database and then used it for personal reasons," Gennaco said, "but that he also lied during the investigation."

Residents in Goodyear said the conduct troubled them. "That's not right at all. Yeah, he should be penalized for that. Punished, or whatever the case may be," said Lindsay, a Goodyear resident who was identified only by her first name. "For somebody to use that, that way, in their own personal, whatever, is just wrong in every sense of the word."

The case is not the first in Arizona involving misuse of automated license plate readers. In August, an Apache Junction officer resigned after using Flock cameras to track his wife. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning legal advocacy group, has documented dozens of instances nationwide in which officers used license plate reader systems to track women, including romantic interests.

For domestic violence victims, the report raises questions about whether the systems meant to help police solve crimes can instead become tools for surveillance by the officers themselves. The woman at the center of the Goodyear case was never told, according to the report, that her plate had been searched repeatedly by the officer assigned to her call.

Goodyear police have not said whether the department has changed its audit practices or training in the wake of the case. The department announced the completion of its investigation in October.