Seven Searches in Milton

A Milton, Georgia detective was fired in August after running his wife’s license plate through the city’s automated plate reader system seven times. His attorney says the searches happened during medical emergencies, when a phone location app failed. The department fired him anyway. The difficult part, and the part a city council should sit with, is that the system had no way to tell the difference at the time, and still does not.

State records show the termination but give no reason. What is known publicly comes from the officer’s attorney, who has said his client was fired for neglect of duty, abuse of position and use of departmental equipment, and that the conduct at issue was seven searches on his wife’s plate over roughly two years. WSB-TV and Atlanta News First have reported the case in detail, including the officer’s name.

The defense offered is not that it did not happen. It is that it was benign. The attorney has said the searches occurred when a phone location app failed to show where his wife was during a medical emergency. His wife has said publicly that the searches related to a medical condition of hers, and that her own account was never included in the internal investigation that ended her husband’s career. The attorney has also said his client should have been permitted to resign in order to keep his certification, and was not.

Milton has not made its reasoning public, and the characterizations above belong to the officer’s side of the case.

It would be easy, and wrong, to write this up as a stalking story. There are genuine stalking cases involving this technology and they look different. In Florida, an affidavit describes an officer querying the same company’s database 717 times to track an estranged wife’s vehicle. Seven searches over two years, offered with a medical explanation, is not that.

Which is precisely why Milton is the more useful case for a council to look at.

What the released logs do and do not show

The sympathetic account is no longer uncontested. Milton’s audit logs have since been released and analyzed by The Roundabout, the local newsletter that has carried most of the reporting on this program, and the parts that can be compared do not line up cleanly with it.

The attorney has placed the seven episodes between February 2025 and January 2026, without describing any single one of them, and the family has not released its plate number or the screenshots it says it holds. That means no individual episode can be matched to a log entry either way.

What can be checked is the account. One account label in the released records resembles the detective’s surname, which the newsletter is careful to note it could not confirm belongs to him. That account ran 1,329 searches. Across all of them, not one gave a reason resembling a welfare check, a medical emergency or a missing person. Nearly all the searches on the two most heavily queried plates recorded the reason as “sus,” short for suspicious, with no case number attached. Within the window that overlaps the claimed period, the account ran close to 500 searches, again with no medical, welfare or missing person reason entered on any of them.

The attorney has also confirmed that in none of the seven episodes did his client call dispatch or notify a supervisor.

None of that establishes stalking, and it should not be read as doing so. Long runs of searches can be ordinary police work, other Milton accounts show similar patterns, the logs run only to the middle of 2025 and leave roughly six months of the claimed period unchecked, and the records do not say whose cars were searched. The honest summary is that the logs neither confirm nor rule out the account given, and that the reason field, which is the only control the system has, was not used to record any of the seven emergencies at the time they allegedly happened.

What the system knew at the time

Assume the sympathetic account is entirely true. A husband could not reach his wife during a medical emergency, a location app failed, and he used a tool available at his desk to find her car.

At the moment that search ran, the system had no way to know that. It had no way to know anything.

A plate reader query records who ran it, when, which plate, and a reason selected from a dropdown menu. It does not know the relationship between the officer and the registered owner. It does not know whether a medical emergency was underway. It does not know whether the person being located wants to be found. The control is a text field and a menu selection, filled in by the person conducting the search, describing their own motive.

Everything that distinguishes a welfare check from surveillance of a family member happened afterward, in an internal investigation, months later, with a career already in the balance. That is not a control. That is an autopsy.

Milton has already answered the audit question

Most councils facing a renewal are asked to imagine how often searches go unreviewed. Milton does not have to imagine. The audit logs of 27 agencies yielded 18,341 searches run by Milton users between January 2023 and May 2026. Of those, 16,640 carried no case number at all, roughly nine in ten.

The trend is the part worth reading twice. The share of searches carrying a case number did not improve as the program grew. It fell every year, from 12.9 percent in 2023 to 6.1 percent across the first five months of 2026, against a departmental policy that requires one.

That is the answer to the question every council asks and almost none can get numbers on. Ninety percent of searches on this system were run without the single piece of documentation the department’s own rules require, and compliance got worse rather than better over three and a half years.

Who signed for a year of the record

The governance record is its own story, and it is the reason this case is about a city rather than about one detective.

The 2022 contract and the police department’s own written policy both held plate data for 30 days. Milton now keeps it for 365. The council never voted on the change. The order extending retention to a year, a 24 month commitment worth $32,400, was signed in October 2025 through the vendor’s own electronic signature system by a police sergeant. The department says the city manager authorized the extension. Asked to produce that authorization in writing, the city answered that responsive records do not exist.

The spending followed the same pattern. The council has approved ten cameras in total, one in October 2019 and nine more in a unanimous February 2022 vote covering a two year plan at $24,750 for the first year. The city has since paid the vendor $341,235.62 according to its own checkbook, and a later five year order listing $320,100 was never ratified by the council. Milton’s camera count now stands at 36 by the city’s own accounting.

Volunteers have mapped 66 plate readers in and around Milton, 53 of them from this vendor, a figure that covers a radius rather than the city limits and so is not directly comparable. The first appeared in the record in November 2024. For comparison within the metro, Alpharetta has 153 mapped, Sandy Springs 154, Roswell 148 and Johns Creek 130. Fulton County holds 976 county wide. Georgia has 10,193.

Per the vendor’s own transparency portal, the Milton department appears in the sharing network with connections to 122 other agencies. The department said in September that access to its data had been narrowed to law enforcement agencies within Georgia, roughly 800 of them, while a separate federal task force agreement covers sharing selected plate reader data with federal and state partners. Which federal agencies receive it has not been answered.

Georgia is not short of examples

Milton is not isolated within the state. In August, Savannah dismissed six employees over use of the same system, including a case in which an officer’s husband, a federal immigration agent, used her account for close to a thousand plate searches across six states. Reporting on these cases notes that police employees in Savannah, Milton, Augusta and Coweta County have been fired, arrested and sued over how the system was used.

That is four Georgia jurisdictions in a single year, and the common thread is not malice. It is that the access control is a login, a login belongs to a person, and people have spouses, emergencies, grudges and bad judgment.

Milton also had two departures this summer, not one. A second officer resigned while under investigation over use of the system in July. In September the department described both matters as remaining under investigation without mentioning that both officers had already left. Neither departure was announced.

The questions worth asking before a renewal

How many searches were run on this network in the last twelve months, and how many were reviewed by anyone. Milton’s answer is 18,341 over three years with nine in ten undocumented, which is what the answer looks like when someone finally counts.

What proportion of searches carry a case number, and what happens to those that do not.

Who is authorized to change retention, and can that authorization be produced in writing. If the answer is that responsive records do not exist, the policy is whatever the last person to sign a form decided.

When was the last audit, who performed it, and what did it find. An audit that has never produced a finding is not evidence of good conduct.

Which outside agencies can query this network today. Not the policy. The number, from the sharing list.

And the one Milton answers by example: what is the process when the person searched is a family member of the person searching, and does anything in the system detect that before the fact.

The answer, currently, is nothing does.

Every camera counted above is listed with its coordinates on DeFlock’s interactive map, including the 66 around Milton. For what these systems collect and what rights residents have, see the learn section, and for concrete local steps see take action.

Reporting on the Milton case: WSB-TV and Atlanta News First. The audit log analysis, retention and contract records are the work of The Roundabout, in its Camera Files series: the search audit, the retention signature and the seven episodes. Camera counts from the DeFlock archive, community-mapped and a floor rather than a census.