2 Greer officers fired for misuse of license plate readers, city says
The short version: Two Greer, SC officers got fired for misusing license plate reader data, proving these powerful surveillance tools get abused even when agencies swear they won't.
Our Take
Credit to WSPA 7News for reporting on this one, because it's exactly the kind of story that gets buried in a local news cycle and forgotten. Two Greer Police officers didn't just bend the rules on license plate reader access — they misused it badly enough to get fired. That's the quiet part policy briefings never say out loud: the technology works exactly as designed, and the "safeguards" are whatever an individual officer decides to respect that day.
Every time Flock Safety or a vendor pitches a city council on ALPR cameras, the sales deck promises audit trails, access controls, and accountability. Those promises are only as good as the humans enforcing them, and humans misuse databases full of other people's travel patterns constantly — for stalking, for personal grudges, for curiosity about an ex. Firing two officers after the fact doesn't undo whatever searches they ran or who they searched for. It just confirms the system has no real-time check, only a post-hoc cleanup crew.
If your town has these cameras watching every car that passes, you deserve to know it, and you deserve to know who's allowed to look at that data and why. Check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR programs in your city, our take-action page has concrete steps to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WSPA 7News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.