By Zachary Bynum
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SAVANNAH, Georgia (WUPA) — Only days after a North Georgia sheriff offered a $1,000 reward for information about a vandalized Flock Safety camera, new arrests involving alleged misuse of the company’s technology are putting another question at the center of the debate: Who is watching the people with access to the cameras?
On Friday, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced the arrests of four former Savannah Police Department employees accused of accessing the Flock Safety system for non-law-enforcement purposes.
The arrests followed an internal audit by Savannah police, according to the GBI. Three former officers were charged with two counts each of misuse of a license plate reader system and violation of oath of office. A former community service specialist was charged with two counts of misuse.
The investigation remains active, and the allegations have not been proven in court.
The Savannah case is the latest in a growing list of alleged misuse cases involving automated license plate readers in Georgia.
In July, five former Albany police officers were arrested after investigators said an internal audit found they had accessed retained Flock license plate data on multiple occasions for non-law-enforcement purposes. Other reported cases across Georgia and the country have included allegations that officers used law enforcement databases to track romantic partners or people they knew personally.
The cases have intensified a broader debate surrounding Atlanta-based Flock Safety and its rapidly expanding network of automated license plate readers — technology that law enforcement officials credit with locating missing people, recovering stolen vehicles and helping investigators solve serious crimes.
Flock says its technology supported more than 1 million criminal investigations and incidents in 2025 and estimates that its products assisted in about 20% of solved cases in jurisdictions using its technology.
But as the network has expanded, so has scrutiny over how the information is accessed, shared and audited when no crime has been committed.
Georgia already has a law governing license plate data Georgia is not without regulations governing license plate readers.
Under state law, captured license plate data held by law enforcement can only be accessed for a law enforcement purpose. Agencies may share that information with other law enforcement agencies for those purposes, and knowingly obtaining or using the data under false pretenses or for another purpose can result in a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature.
The law also requires agencies deploying automated license plate recognition systems to maintain policies governing their use and officer training.
But the recent arrests have highlighted an important distinction between having rules and preventing someone with authorized access from breaking them.
In Atlanta, Mayor Andre Dickens has ordered a comprehensive review of the city’s use of Flock technology, and Atlanta police have said a team is reviewing officers’ searches for possible unauthorized use.
Flock is also changing some of its own safeguards.
CEO Garrett Langley announced this month that the company is moving toward a seven-day default retention period for license plate reader data, down from 30 days, while allowing evidence connected to active investigations to be preserved.
The company also says law enforcement customers will be required to use its “Audit Assistance” system, which is designed to flag unusual search activity. Other changes include requiring case codes for searches and automatically suspending access in some circumstances until potentially suspicious activity can be reviewed by an agency administrator.
“We’re setting a higher bar for ourselves and the industry,” Langley said when announcing the changes.
Those safeguards arrive as communities across the country reconsider their relationships with the company.
Stow, Massachusetts, recently ended its relationship with Flock after an officer was accused of improperly using the system to look up someone he knew. Salem and Framingham are among other Massachusetts communities that have moved away from the technology amid concerns about privacy and data sharing.
Still, many police departments remain strong supporters of automated license plate readers.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr earlier this year led a multistate coalition defending law enforcement access to the technology, calling automated license plate readers a “critical crime-fighting tool” that has helped authorities solve murders, kidnappings and armed robberies.
Research into the technology’s effect on crime is continuing. One recent working paper examining Flock deployments across more than 200 law enforcement agencies found motor vehicle theft declined after the cameras were deployed. Researchers also found an increase in vehicle-theft clearance rates, though they cautioned that the improvement began before deployment in some agencies, making it more difficult to attribute the entire change to the cameras.
The findings illustrate one of the central complications surrounding the debate: Evidence suggests license plate readers can be useful to investigators, while questions remain about how broadly the technology should be deployed and how its use should be controlled.
Protests reach Flock’s hometown Those concerns were on display this past week in Atlanta.
As hundreds of public safety officials and others gathered for Flock Forward, the company’s annual conference, protesters gathered outside Atlanta City Hall and near the conference demanding that the city and private businesses end their relationships with Flock.
The protests came the same week Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard offered $1,000 for information after he said someone damaged a Flock camera placed in a park.
Jarrard defended the technology, saying the cameras were being used to help identify sex offenders visiting the park and were intended to protect children.
“It’s not watching you,” Jarrard told CBS News Atlanta while discussing the damaged camera.
Kamau Franklin, founder of Atlanta-based Community Movement Builders, offered a sharply different assessment during a protest Wednesday.
“Flock is a surveillance system which has taken over Atlanta, and we’re protesting because we want to protect people’s right to privacy,” Franklin said.
The tension between those two views — one presenting the cameras as a targeted public-safety tool and the other viewing the network as mass surveillance — has become increasingly difficult for local governments to ignore.
What about federal immigration enforcement? Another flash point has been whether Flock data can ultimately be used by federal immigration authorities.
Flock says it does not have a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras or data by default. The company says individual communities control whether their information is shared with other agencies.
Public records and investigative reporting, however, have documented instances in which local or state officers searched license plate-reader databases on behalf of federal immigration authorities or allowed searches of locally controlled data for immigration-related investigations.
That distinction is significant.
It does not mean ICE has unrestricted access to the entire Flock network. It does mean information collected by one government agency can potentially travel beyond the agency that originally collected it, depending on its policies, sharing agreements and the actions of individual users.
Flock has previously acknowledged limited pilot programs with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations, while maintaining that it does not directly work with ICE.
The company has since announced additional controls that it says will give communities more authority over what data can be shared.
A civil rights attorney says the law needs to catch up Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, told CBS News Atlanta that she believes Georgia needs broader privacy protections beyond rules governing a particular surveillance technology.
“We need robust privacy protections in Georgia,” Benavidez said. “Georgia code doesn’t even have a privacy or digital rights section, shocking given the age we’re in and the kinds of legal safeguards needed in the 21st century.”
Benavidez said lawmakers should consider stronger protections against both government and corporate misuse of personal data when the General Assembly returns in 2027.
“Whether it’s facial recognition technology or license plate readers or structural tech like the 3+ gigawatt data center proposed in Effingham County, the law has to catch up to protect communities from unwarranted surveillance and to give Georgians a pathway for remedy if their rights are violated,” she said.
Benavidez also argues that expanded access to location information raises constitutional questions.
“There are serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns any time the government goes around the Constitution, accessing our private information and data without a warrant,” she said.
The U.S. Supreme Court addressed a related, though not identical, question earlier this year in Chatrie v. United States. The court ruled that law enforcement conducted a Fourth Amendment search when officers obtained a person’s historical cellphone location data from Google through a geofence warrant.
The ruling did not determine that all government access to location information requires a warrant, nor did it specifically address automated license plate readers. The court sent unresolved questions about whether the warrant in that case satisfied constitutional requirements back to a lower court.
For Benavidez, the larger concern is how powerful surveillance systems can be used once they exist.
She pointed to a long history of government surveillance of civil rights organizations and political movements and argued that modern technology can dramatically expand the government’s ability to track people’s movements.
“Surveillance and AI tech is not going away; but neither is the widening public condemnation of these extractive tools,” Benavidez said. “Georgia is home to some of the most meaningful civil rights fights and wins our country has seen. We have the opportunity to lead in creating digital civil rights frameworks for the future.”
Flock, meanwhile, argues that safeguards and accountability can coexist with the continued use of technology that police departments say has become an important investigative tool.
That leaves Georgia with a debate increasingly centered not simply on whether license plate readers should exist, but on the rules surrounding them: how long data should be kept, when it can be searched, which agencies can see it, how misuse is detected and what happens when someone with legitimate access uses it for an illegitimate purpose.
Recent arrests show Georgia already has consequences for some forms of misuse.
The unresolved question is whether oversight should catch that misuse before investigators have to.
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