VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. – An Orange City police officer has been accused of using license plate readers to track the whereabouts of a woman last year, according to the Volusia Sheriff’s Office.
In an affidavit, investigators said they received a complaint about the behavior in early November 2024 after a woman came forward to report it.
The woman told detectives that she and the officer — Jarmarus Brown, 29 — had been in an “intimate relationship” for around 10 months, the affidavit states.
“During this time, Officer Brown exhibited controlling behavior by attempting to control her daily activities, trying to distance her from her family, often sitting in his patrol vehicle outside of her workplace, and even placed a GPS air tag in her wallet without her knowledge or consent,” the affidavit reads.
In addition, investigators said she told them that Brown would often show her videos of her own vehicle traveling through intersections, and she believed he was using a license plate reader to track her whereabouts.
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According to the affidavit, the woman claimed the relationship ultimately fell apart by October 2024, though Brown would continue showing up uninvited to places where she was at.
“After the two broke off their relationship, (REDACTED) reconnected a friendship with Officer Shadrach King,” the affidavit adds. “Upon doing so, she was alerted by Officer Shadrach King that Jarmarus was spreading rumors about her, saying she was suicidal.”
The complaints sparked an audit into Brown’s search history of the Flock license plate reader program, which revealed he’d been repeatedly running tags for three specific vehicles over the course of roughly seven months, detectives stated. The identities of the respective vehicle owners were redacted in the affidavit.
However, the affidavit does say that Officer King had noticed Brown’s activity on the Flock system, and he’d mentioned that Brown “needed to stop running her vehicle in that system because he could get in trouble.”
When confronted about the allegations in an interview with detectives last month, Brown reportedly claimed that the woman had been doing “suspicious things” earlier that year, such as refusing to share her location with him and lying about where she was, investigators said.
In addition, Brown was asked about the tags he’d been running, and he said, “Like I told my agency, it was dumb as hell on my end, emotions flowing, mind going,” the affidavit says.
Brown was later arrested and faces charges of stalking and accessing electronic devices without proper authority.
News 6 has reached out to the Orange City Police Department for comment and is awaiting a response.
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