85 Searches: An Alpharetta Officer Used Flock to Track Two Fellow Cops

A patrol officer in Alpharetta, Georgia ran 85 searches of the Flock Safety camera network to track two people. Both of them were fellow Alpharetta police officers. One was a former romantic partner. The searches ran from March to May of this year, the officer resigned in August, and the matter is now under criminal investigation.

What the records show

According to reporting by The Washington Post and case records compiled in the Institute for Justice database of ALPR abuse, Dustin Bozzo, then a patrolman with the Alpharetta Police Department, searched the license plate of a former romantic partner 56 times between March and May. She was a member of the same department. Their relationship had violated the city policy against workplace dating.

When Bozzo noticed that her vehicle was often parked near another officer’s, he began searching that officer’s plate as well, 29 more times over the same period. Lieutenant Jason Hiott of the Alpharetta Police Department confirmed that Bozzo was placed on paid leave on July 20 and resigned on August 5 following an internal investigation. Bozzo has said he did not use the system with intent to intimidate or cause harm. The case has since been referred for criminal investigation.

The part that should worry people who have done nothing wrong

It is tempting to file this under bad apple. That reading misses what the case actually demonstrates.

Nothing about those 85 searches required a warrant, a supervisor’s approval, or a documented reason that anyone checked at the time. The system did what it was built to do. A credentialed user typed in a plate and the network returned where that vehicle had been. The audit log recorded every one of those searches faithfully, which is how the conduct was eventually identified. But an audit log is a record of what already happened. It is not a control that prevents anything.

The two people tracked here were sworn police officers, which is the only reason this surfaced at all. A resident being searched 85 times would have no colleagues, no internal affairs process, and no way to ever learn it had occurred.

What sits in Alpharetta

Volunteers have documented 151 automated license plate readers in Alpharetta, of which 127 are Flock Safety units. Across Fulton County the figure is 1,387, and statewide Georgia has 9,882 documented ALPR cameras, 9,057 of them Flock. Those numbers are a floor rather than a total, since they count only what someone has physically found and logged.

Every one of those cameras feeds the same searchable system that produced this case.

Not an isolated case

The Washington Post investigation that surfaced the Alpharetta searches identified more than 50 instances nationally of officers using Flock to track partners, former partners and acquaintances. In the weeks since, a South Carolina deputy who had been named Deputy of the Year resigned amid a Flock abuse investigation, an Indiana officer resigned over camera searches, and a Texas dispatcher resigned after records showed a single user had run more than 20,000 searches.

The common thread is not that these systems were breached. They were used exactly as designed, by people who were supposed to have access.

The question for any city council

Whether a department should have this capability is one debate. A narrower and more answerable question is what happens between the search and the audit. Who approves a lookup before it runs. How often logs are actually reviewed rather than merely kept. Whether a resident can ever find out their own plate was searched, and by whom.

In most places those answers do not exist in writing. That absence is the policy.

What you can do

Check whether your community has these cameras on the camera map, and see the Georgia breakdown by county and city. If you are not sure what one looks like, there are photographs of installed cameras taken by volunteers. To press for audit and access policies where you live, the Take Action page has the specific questions worth putting to a council or department in writing.