Two Peachtree City Officers Gone After Flock Misuse. Reform Is Needed.

Two Peachtree City police officers are no longer with the department after their activities were identified as apparent misuse of the city’s Flock license plate camera system, and both cases have been turned over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The public had not been told. I learned about it only because I asked.

Back in February I wrote about the Flock license plate cameras in Peachtree City. The police department was generous with its time, walked me through how the system works, and answered every question I asked. I came away reassured enough to write that “there are real safeguards in place, and they are worth knowing about.” And at the time, I meant it. Everything I had been shown suggested a department that understood the power of the tool it was holding and had built the guardrails to match.

I still believe the cameras can do real good. Three weeks ago in Senoia, a Flock alert on a Florida pickup led officers to a missing 10-year-old. Without the cameras, who knows what could have happened.

But seven months have passed since that February column, and the public attitude around these cameras is very different.A national YouGov survey released last month found that more Americans now oppose police license plate readers in their communities than support them, a sharp reversal from a year ago.

Enough had shifted that I decided to go back to the Peachtree City Police Department and ask how the system was being used now and whether anything had gone wrong. The answers are why I am writing this column.

A Problem Bigger Than Any One Department

Automated license plate readers have spread faster than almost any policing technology in memory, and Flock Safety, the Atlanta company that dominates the market, has grown with them. Georgia has one of the largest concentrations of Flock cameras of any state. Those cameras photograph the rear of every passing vehicle and store the plate, the time, the location, and a set of visual characteristics that can be searched later by anyone with a login.

The abuse cases have grown with the deployments. By August, reporting had documented nearly 50 cases nationally of officers misusing the network. Here is just a sample:

• In Milwaukee, an officer was charged after audit records showed he had searched his romantic partner’s plate 124 times and that person’s ex 55 times, all while on duty.
• In Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, an officer lost her job this week after an early audit of a system the town had installed only in March.
• The wildest case I came across is also from North Carolina. A Charlotte officer was arrested after a drug dealer under investigation asked him to look up a license plate, and he did. He ran the plate through Flock and a state database and passed the results along. The vehicle belonged to an undercover officer.

Georgia’s share of that story has been outsized. Since late June, the list of officers fired, charged, or both has grown almost weekly.

• In late June, the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office fired and charged two supervisors for misusing the county’s plate reader system.
• On July 6, five Albany police officers were fired and arrested after an internal audit found repeated searches with no law enforcement purpose.
• On July 17, a 17-year DeKalb County sheriff’s sergeant was fired and charged with a felony.
• In late July, a Habersham County deputy was fired and arrested over searches involving someone he had a personal relationship with.
• In August, Savannah fired six employees and the GBI arrested four of them, including one accused of giving an outside agency access to the system.
• On September 4, three Gwinnett County officers were fired and charged, one of whom had already been arrested for stalking an ex-partner.

The same day DeKalb announced its charges, the story arrived in Fayette County. On July 17, the Fayetteville Police Department announced it had fired three officers after an audit found them running searches on their own plates and those of family members and acquaintances. The department said the searches had no legitimate law enforcement purpose, referred the matter to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and noted that the activity was found “during the activation and testing of a new internal auditing feature.”

Read all of these cases together and a pattern emerges that has little to do with rogue detectives digging into strangers. The officers were, overwhelmingly, looking up themselves, their exes, their relatives, and people they knew.

The other part of the pattern is how the misuse came to light. In nearly every Georgia case, Fayetteville included, it was discovered only after Flock released an audit tool this spring and departments switched it on. State law did not require anyone to look, but since the vendor made it easy, departments found things.

Fayetteville is nine miles from Peachtree City. The two departments share a camera network, a county, and, in many cases, the same suspects.

Unfortunately, we share more than that.

It Happened Here

On September 2, I wrote to Captain Brad Williams, who had walked me through the system in February, with three questions. How was the department using Flock now? What privacy protections were in place? Had Peachtree City experienced any misuse of its own?

He wrote to me two days later with a bombshell at the end.

“The department has identified two officers whose activities appear to have involved misuse of the system,” Williams wrote. “Neither officer is employed by the department any longer, and both matters were turned over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for further investigation.”

To the department’s credit, it took the right steps once it found the problem. The officers are gone, and the cases are with the GBI, which is the same path Fayetteville, Albany, Savannah, and others have taken with theirs.

What the department did not do was tell the public. Two officers of the Peachtree City Police Department misused a system that holds a record of where every car in the city has been, and residents are learning about it here, in response to a question I asked, rather than from the city.

It did not have to be that way. When Savannah’s police department found misuse, the mayor announced it the same daythe employees were placed on leave and referred to the GBI, a week before anyone was fired. Three days later, the chief and city manager held a press conference and told residents exactly how many searches had been flagged and how many the department considered unjustified. Fayetteville and Albany both issued public statements on their own initiative while their GBI investigations were still open. An open investigation did not stop any of them from telling the public the basics.

Had I not asked, I am not sure when, or whether, we would have known about Peachtree City. That matters because of what I was told in February.

What I Was Told Then And What the Department Says Now

When I sat down with Williams last winter, I asked directly about the risk of officers misusing the system. Here is how the department’s account then compares with its account now, drawn from my February interview and from Williams’s recent written response.

On Auditing

In February, Williams told me that “every search is auditable,” and that supervisors could “go back and figure out what each employee’s been searching.” That statement was true. Every search generates a log entry. What it left out was whether anyone was reading those entries on a regular basis.

In September, Williams wrote that “before 2026, the structure of Flock’s system and the manner in which its data was available for review made comprehensive audits of user activity challenging.” The department, he said, “implemented an ongoing quarterly audit process for Flock usage at the beginning of 2026,” after Flock added customer-accessible auditing tools that “significantly improved the process.” Peachtree City helped beta test those tools.

The distinction between auditable and audited is important to highlight. A log nobody reviews deters only the officers who assume someone is reviewing it. The routine, scheduled review that would catch a bad search is new this year. While the department did not say how or when it identified the two officers, it has said that the process capable of finding them did not exist in its current form until 2026.

On Justifying A Search

In February, the department’s policy required that a plate search serve a legitimate law enforcement purpose, and the procedure signed by Chief Janet Moon in July 2025 spelled out how officers should verify an alert before acting on it. The tighter rules applied to facial recognition. That tool was limited to a handful of investigators. Every search had to be tied to a case number, and the accounts were audited quarterly. I pointed to those requirements in my February column as a safeguard, and they were. They just did not apply to the plate system, which far more officers could search, which held a far larger record of where people had been.

In September, Williams wrote that officers “are now required to enter more specific information supporting the legitimate law-enforcement purpose of each search.” The department has also moved Flock behind the city’s Microsoft 365 single sign-on so an officer’s access can be cut off through the city’s ordinary account controls rather than through a separate vendor login.

On How Long The Data Lasts

In February, Williams told me the department keeps plate data for a full year (longer than Flock’s default at the time of 30 days) because leads sometimes take 60 or 90 days to develop. His September response did not address retention, so I will not assume it has changed. It is worth knowing that Flock’s own recommended default is now seven days, that Gwinnett cut its window to 15 days after its firings, and that Georgia law permits 30 months. A year may sit comfortably inside the law but exceeds the vendor’s advice.

On Who Gets Searched

In February, I asked Williams whether residents worried about being tracked. He said almost nobody had ever raised it, and that the one person who came in to talk it through left satisfied once he understood the system stored a photograph of a plate on a public road. Then Williams talked about his own Ring cameras and his own Alexa and said, “I’m a pretty boring guy. I’m not, like, no national secrets going on there.” I wrote at the time that most of us feel the same way, and I still think that is true.

But look at who the fired officers across Georgia were actually searching. They were looking up themselves, their exes, their family members, and their acquaintances. Being a boring guy seems to protect you from a government that has no reason to care where you drive. It does nothing to protect you from someone who has a login and a grudge, or a crush, or a simple curiosity.

On Whether It Works

In his September response to me, Williams was emphatic that the system works. The clearance rate for cases assigned to the department’s Criminal Investigations Division averaged 43% in 2019 and 2020. In 2024 and 2025 with Flock it averaged 70.2%. “While other factors undoubtedly contributed to that improvement,” he wrote, “the use of Flock ALPR technology is distinctly the largest single contributor.”

I am in no position to dispute those numbers, and I will not argue that the cameras do not work. But taken together, the department’s two accounts describe something other than a system that was broken and is now fixed. They describe a system that was always powerful, that was governed for years mostly by policy language and good intentions, and that acquired real oversight only once the vendor delivered the means to provide it.

You could take this part of the story as a department that has improved. I don’t.

It means that the safeguards arrived on Flock’s schedule rather than ours.

When The Vendor Outpaces The Government

This is not a problem specific to Peachtree City. Every department in Georgia runs the same software under the same state law, and the gaps that let two officers here misuse the system exist everywhere the cameras do.

A city can control how carefully its own officers use the tool, but what a city cannot do is reach beyond its own department. It cannot set rules for the dozens of other agencies that search its cameras, attach a criminal penalty to misuse, strip a fired officer of his certification, or give a resident who was tracked the right to sue. Only the state can do those things, and so far the state has not.

But filling this gap, oddly enough, is Flock.

On August 13, Flock’s chief executive, Garrett Langley, announced a broad overhaul of the company’s rules. The default retention window dropped from 30 days to seven for new customers because the company found that more than 90% of searches without a full plate are completed within a week. Every law enforcement customer must enable Flock’s Audit Assistance feature by the end of the year. Case codes will be mandatory for every search with emergency bypasses flagged for later review. Accounts that show abnormal activity will get locked automatically pending an administrator’s review.

Much of this is what a good reform law would require, but no such law exists. A private company that sells surveillance cameras is arguably doing more to protect Georgians from the misuse of its cameras than the State of Georgia itself.

If we want real governance, it has to come from the General Assembly. So it is worth looking at what Georgia has actually written.

O.C.G.A. 35-1-22

The statute O.C.G.A. 35-1-22 passed as House Bill 79 in 2018. It allows law enforcement to collect plate data, and it requires that the data be destroyed after 30 months unless it is tied to a toll violation or a law enforcement purpose. It permits agencies to share the data with one another, makes misuse a high and aggravated misdemeanor, and exempts the data from open records requests.

This whole framework relies on two phrases. Data may not be accessed “except for a law enforcement purpose,” and the statute defines that purpose as “the investigation of an offense or activity initiated by a law enforcement agency.” It defines nothing else. There is no requirement that a search be tied to a case number, no warrant required to pull a person’s location history, no standard for what a log must record, no requirement that anyone ever review the logs, no rule governing what is shared with out-of-state or federal agencies, and no right to sue for a person who was unlawfully tracked.

The law’s own sponsor saw problems like this coming. Former Representative John Pezold told Now Georgia last monththat his original bill would have purged plate data after roughly 30 days. However, the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association wanted 30 months, and Pezold accepted the compromise rather than lose the bill entirely.

One more sign that the statute is not doing its job is visible in the charging documents. In case after case this summer, prosecutors have stacked a felony charge of violating the oath of office on top of the plate-data misdemeanor because the plate statute by itself carries so little weight.

When the law written for a problem is the one prosecutors reach past, it needs rewriting.

What I Suggested

I put together a set of suggestions for tightening the statute. They draw in part on a driver privacy law Washington State passed this year with bipartisan support. I sent them to our Georgia legislators – Representative Josh Bonner and Senator Marty Harbin.

The first is what it should take to look someone up and how far back the record should go. Every search should require a written reason tied to a case number, an incident number, a warrant, or an active alert. Checking a plate against a live hot list would work exactly as it does today so the Senoia stop I mentioned earlier would happen the same way as it did. Pulling up a person’s movements over weeks or months is a different matter, and that should require a warrant. Those movements also should not sit in the system forever, and I suggested 90 days to cover the slow-developing leads the department described to me.

The second is oversight. Every search should be logged in a standard format. The logs should be audited on a regular schedule by someone independent of the officers being reviewed. The results should go to the city council, not back into the department that produced them. Flock’s audit tool can help with that work, but it cannot be the audit.

The third is who else gets access. Georgia agencies should keep sharing with one another as they do now. Out-of-state and federal agencies should have to show a documented legal basis before they can search. Flock’s national sharing network should be something a department opts into on purpose, not something it has to remember to opt out of. Data brokers and other private parties should be shut out entirely.

The fourth is consequences. The current law’s real weakness is that it assigns duties and attaches nothing to them. Willful misuse to track, stalk, or harass someone should be a felony that costs an officer his state certification. Being fired in one county should not become a job application in the next. A department that will not log or audit should lose its authority to run the system. And a person who is unlawfully tracked should be able to sue with damages set per violation and attorney’s fees included.

What Our Legislators Said

Both responded to my suggestions within a few days.

Representative Bonner wrote, “I agree we need to tighten up the law regarding these cameras. While I fully support the ability of law enforcement to keep our community safe, I do have concerns over privacy and the misuse of these cameras.” He added that “a number of my colleagues in the House and Senate share these concerns and I’m confident we’ll take action during the upcoming Session,” and that “from what I’ve reviewed so far, I think your recommendations make sense.”

Senator Harbin pointed to where any bill would have to go. “This legislation would fall within the jurisdiction of the Senate Public Safety Committee, chaired by John Albers,” he wrote. He expects the issue to be “one of the more important public safety and technology issues considered during the upcoming legislative session,” and he encouraged me to participate in committee hearings.

Those are supportive words, and I take them as sincere. They are also, so far, only words.

Neither legislator said what specifically should change, and neither said he would sponsor a bill or ask a colleague to. Representative Bonner’s confidence that the General Assembly will act is welcome, but it is confidence in a body rather than a commitment from a member. I understand why an elected official is careful with his comments before a session begins. Still, with officers being fired across the state and the vendor rewriting its own rules, this is the moment to say plainly what reform should look like and to put a name on it.

Senator John Albers, a Republican from Roswell referenced by Senator Harbin, is saying the right things. In an August 24 editorial, he wrote that Georgia’s framework must “have teeth,” that oversight should be “routine rather than reactive,” and that he is working with the sheriffs’ and police chiefs’ associations on recommendations for January. He called Flock’s changes “constructive and necessary” and said the company “must do more.” He has not endorsed any specific bill, but a public safety chairman writing that “backing the blue does not mean writing a blank check for government surveillance” is a meaningful signal.

Fix Them Or Lose Them

By now there are many reasons to be against these cameras, and anyone who has arrived at that position has been paying attention. We were led to believe the system was governed, and it was not. Two Peachtree City officers misused it, and nothing in state law stopped them, caught them, or required anyone to try.

The cameras themselves are not the problem because the evidence shows they work. Brooks Mayor Dan Langford put it as plainly as anyone could in a note to this paper’s editor. Recalling a case from nearly two years ago, he wrote that the cameras “were used to find a missing loved one of a family I know, and to get the loved one home safely and soundly. It could have ended very differently had it not been for the Flock Cameras.” Everyone who knows that family, he added, feels as he does, “thankful for the technology that allows lost loved ones to be found.”

Despite successes like this, it is still appropriate to ask whether the people in law enforcement holding so much power can be trusted with it. We were told yes, and that trust has been broken. And when two Peachtree City officers were removed and referred to the GBI, nobody told us. It took a columnist asking.

A tool with genuine benefits and documented abuse needs to be governed, not defended blindly and not banned on reflex. Governed means binding rules with real consequences, written by elected representatives and enforced by officials who answer to voters.

The next step is simple. Either the state writes rules that can be shown to work, or the cameras come down. After this summer, residents should not be asked to keep trusting a system that has not earned it. That job now belongs to the representatives who are supposed to govern these cameras. Until they do, the most this system deserves is a conditional pass, and that pass expires when the General Assembly convenes in January.

Until Then

Contact your state legislators before the session opens. Tell them you want a bill, not a study, and ask what they intend to sponsor.

• Senator Marty Harbin, District 16, [email protected], (404) 656-0078
• Representative Josh Bonner, District 73, [email protected], (404) 463-7853
• Senator John Albers, Chairman, Senate Public Safety Committee, [email protected], (404) 463-8055

If you are not sure who represents you, use the Find My Legislator tool at legis.ga.gov.

Ask the Peachtree City Council to act now. The council meets in regular session on the third Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall with a work session on the first Thursday at 9:30 a.m. The next regular meeting is Thursday, September 17. Public comment is taken at regular meetings. You can also email Mayor Kim Learnard, the full council, and the city manager as a group at citycouncil@peachtree-city.org.

Ask for three specific things:

• A written policy requiring a case number before any plate search.
• An independent audit of search logs at least twice a year with the results presented in open session.
• A standing commitment that any misuse of the system will be disclosed to the public within days of discovery and with a confirmation that the case was referred to the appropriate authorities.

Fayetteville residents can bring the same three requests to the Fayetteville City Council. Meeting dates and council contact information are posted at fayetteville-ga.gov and can be contacted here.

When hearings on this issue are scheduled in Atlanta, go. Senator Harbin himself encouraged public participation. Take him up on it.