SWAT Sergeant Arrested for Tracking Citizens with Flock Cameras | Salawu DeKalb County SO

Our Take

Credit to OhDangReally for laying out the Kabiru Salawu case plainly: a trusted, decorated SWAT sergeant with nearly two decades on the job allegedly turned DeKalb County's Flock network into his personal tracking tool. Sheriff Melody Maddox moved fast to fire and arrest him, which is more accountability than most departments ever deliver. But the video's real gut-punch is the list that follows — Greene County, Cherokee County, Fayetteville. This isn't one bad apple. It's a pattern, and Georgia is just the state where it's surfacing fastest.

This is the part Flock Safety and friendly sheriffs never want to talk about during the sales pitch: the system runs on trust, and trust breaks. These cameras don't just catch a plate once — they build a timeline of your movements, your routines, your car's quirks, even the hum of your tires. That's not a tool for solving a specific crime. That's a permanent surveillance ledger sitting there, waiting for whoever has login access to misuse it, whether that's a stalker ex-boyfriend with a badge or a cop running plates for a side hustle. Audits and 'policies' are not the same as oversight, and oversight is not the same as consequences — most of these stories only come out after someone gets caught, not because the system was built to prevent abuse in the first place.

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. Check our map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back on local deployment or demand real audit trails from your department, start with our take-action guide.