Georgia police officers fired after Flock camera misuse

Our Take

Credit to ABC News for putting a name and a number on what critics of this technology have been saying for years: give enough people access to a nationwide license plate database and some of them will use it for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety. Six former Savannah Police Department employees aren't facing a policy memo or a stern email — they're facing a criminal investigation. That's the system working only after the damage was done, not before.

Flock Safety and the departments that buy its cameras love to talk about audit logs and "reason for search" fields as if a dropdown menu is the same thing as accountability. This case shows the gap between those two things. Internal controls only matter if someone is actually checking them, and the people checking them are often the same agencies with every incentive to look the other way until a story breaks. Savannah isn't an outlier because the misuse happened — it's an outlier because it got caught.

Every one of these cameras exists in a network most residents never voted on and can't see into. If you want to know whether your town is wired into this system, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment where you live, our take-action page is the place to start.