At least 20 Georgia law enforcement officers have been disciplined or criminally charged for misusing Flock Safety license plate readers to track romantic partners and acquaintances, according to an Atlanta News First investigation published Friday, July 17. Johns Creek police have had access to the same searchable vehicle-location network since 2019, but it remains unclear what oversight policies govern local officers' use of the system.

The cases documented by Atlanta News First are part of a broader national pattern of concerns about how officers access mass vehicle-location data. Five Albany Police Department officers were arrested July 6 by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on charges of accessing the Flock system for non-law enforcement purposes. The GBI said in a press release that an internal audit revealed the officers had used retained license plate data on multiple occasions for personal reasons. They were booked into the Dougherty County Jail. Two Cherokee County Sheriff's Office administrators were also fired and arrested after a separate audit.

Johns Creek's Flock relationship

The Johns Creek Police Department signed a data-sharing memorandum of understanding with Flock in 2019, gaining access to 17 cameras installed by neighborhood HOAs in six subdivisions at no cost to the city. Then-Police Chief Ed Densmore described the system in a 2019 council agenda report as "an extraordinary tool to help officers solve crimes in our city." The current camera count is not publicly available.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that partners with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, launched a new AI-powered "Audit Assistance" tool in April. The tool continuously monitors search activity and flags patterns that fall outside a department's policy, sending alerts to supervisors for review. Before it existed, Flock described its own audit process as "manual, tedious and reactive."

"Flock's audit tools have proven effective at enabling accountability," spokesperson Paris Lewbel told Atlanta News First. "In many of the rare documented cases of misuse of our platform, it was our own audit logs that surfaced the issue."

Transparency concerns

Atlanta News First also reported that Flock has reduced what the public can see in records obtained through open records requests. The company removed officer names from audit logs, replacing them with anonymized ID numbers, and stopped including license plate numbers. Lewbel said all omitted information remains available to the originating agency and authorized oversight bodies.

Critics argue those changes make it harder for residents to determine whether an officer improperly searched for a specific vehicle. In at least one Georgia case, an alleged victim discovered the surveillance only after checking HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a website that compiled searchable audit data from public records.

Local accountability gap

It is not clear whether the Johns Creek Police Department has activated Flock's Audit Assistance tool or what internal policies govern officer searches. JCPD did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

No Johns Creek City Council agenda item addressing Flock oversight or surveillance technology policy has been identified.