Georgia state senator responds to Flock camera misuse, privacy concerns: ‘Bad apples don’t spoil...
The short version: A Georgia state senator brushes off Flock misuse reports as 'bad apples,' even as Florida just banned highway LPRs entirely.
Our Take
WALB News 10's report captures the stock response we hear every time an agency gets caught misusing Flock's ALPR network: a lawmaker shrugging off documented abuse as a few 'bad apples,' as if the problem is individual judgment rather than a system built to record every car, every day, with almost no guardrails. The 'bad apples' line is doing a lot of work here — it asks the public to trust that thousands of officers and dozens of agencies sharing the same database will police themselves, when the whole point of these networks is that oversight is thin and audit logs are rarely checked until something blows up in the press.
It's worth noting the contrast buried in the same report: Florida's governor just banned license plate readers on state highways entirely, a sign that even red-state officials are starting to treat this as a genuine civil liberties problem, not a PR hiccup. Georgia's response, by comparison, is to defend the status quo and hope the next misuse story doesn't land on a bigger desk. Credit to WALB for pushing the senator on this instead of letting 'a few bad apples' pass as an answer.
If you want to see how many of these cameras are already watching your own commute, check our map, and if you'd rather your city not be the next 'bad apple' headline, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WALB News 10, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.