3 more Georgia police officers fired over alleged Flock camera misuse

Three Fayetteville police officers are out of a job after allegedly using the department’s license plate reader system to look up their own tag numbers or those belonging to people they know, authorities said Friday.

The officers, whose names were not disclosed, were fired after their unauthorized searches were discovered “during the activation and testing of a new internal auditing feature,” Fayetteville police said.

They join a growing list of Georgia law enforcement officers who have recently been terminated or criminally charged for allegedly misusing the widespread surveillance technology. As has happened in other cases, Fayetteville’s department said auditing tools meant to strengthen oversight of the surveillance system flagged the police officers’ activity.

An internal investigation was launched after the audit “identified what appeared to be license plate searches inconsistent with the system’s authorized use,” the Fayetteville police department said in a news release announcing the firings.

A spokesperson declined to name the three former officers or say how long they had been with the department.

“The activity identified during the audit revealed that the employees searched their own license plates or those of a family member/acquaintance, and not random members of the public,” the department said, noting the searches were made with no “legitimate law-enforcement purpose.”

While no charges have been filed, a GBI spokesperson confirmed Fayetteville police alerted the state agency, which is now investigating.

Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based manufacturer of the license-plate readers, has come under immense scrutiny in recent months over what critics view as an invasive surveillance system knitted together through a network of cameras frequently mounted on poles, streetlights and overpasses.

Some cities have abandoned their Flock contracts amid the growing concerns about what is done with the data collected.

Flock in April rolled out a new “audit assistance” feature that automatically flags searches that seem suspicious and alerts a police department’s leaders, the company told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.

An off-duty officer searching Flock’s database would be an example of the type of activity that could trigger a notification.

The new feature is available to all police departments that use Flock, but for now, it is something they have to choose to turn on, the company said. It wasn’t immediately clear if Fayetteville police were using the new feature when the department discovered the searches that led to the recent firings.

Flock has an estimated 140,000 active users accessing data each month and says the majority of those searches are appropriate.

“We trust law enforcement to do the right thing. And the vast, vast majority of them do,” said Josh Thomas, chief communications officer for Flock. “(But) if there’s corruption within the police department, that needs to be outed and those people need to be held accountable.”

Flock’s network includes more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, according to the company’s website. Those license plate readers make an estimated 20 billion scans each month, capturing the license plate number and other characteristics of every vehicle that passes by its cameras.

At least six other Georgia law enforcement officers were fired this month and charged with misusing the technology.

That’s in addition to the three Cherokee County sheriff’s deputies and a Richmond County deputy arrested in June after allegedly using the departments’ license plate recognition databases for non-law enforcement purposes. In November, the city of Braselton’s then-police chief resigned after the GBI said he misused the systems to harass and stalk multiple people.

Similar cases outside metro Atlanta include a Coffee County deputy accused of misusing license plate data and stalking, and an Echols County Sheriff’s Office secretary accused of using the agency’s Flock account to search tag information for two people she knew.