Savannah Police Department fires 6 employees over Flock Safety System misuse
The short version: Six Savannah officers were fired for misusing Flock ALPR access to track friends and family, proving the abuse critics warned about isn't hypothetical.
Our Take
Upvoted News reports that Savannah Police fired six employees for digging through the department's Flock Safety license plate reader system to track people in their personal lives — not criminal suspects, just friends, family, maybe exes. This is exactly the scenario privacy advocates keep flagging and departments keep insisting won't happen. It happened.
The pitch for these camera networks is always public safety: find the stolen car, catch the hit-and-run. But once a department wires up thousands of plate scans a day into a searchable database, you've built a tool that's trivially easy to turn into a stalking engine for anyone with a login. Audit logs and 'policy' only matter if someone's actually watching them, and in this case someone was — after the fact. How many searches like this go unnoticed in departments that aren't checking?
Firings are a start, but they're not accountability for the people whose plates got pulled without cause, and they don't fix the underlying design flaw: a system built to normalize constant tracking of everyone, with trust as the only safeguard. If there's a Flock camera near you, check our camera map and see what oversight — if any — your local department actually has in place, then use our take-action resources to push for real audits and limits.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Upvoted News, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.