A surveillance company's software now flags the officers who abuse its license plate network, and terminations are following.
Five officers in Albany, Georgia were fired after Flock Safety's new AI audit tool flagged their searches as abnormal. WSB-TV reported the termination in mid-July, one of the first documented cases where the tool directly preceded a disciplinary outcome.
More than 10 officers across Georgia have been fired or charged this year for misusing the company's license plate reader network for personal reasons, according to WSB-TV. A separate count puts the total number of recent similar cases in the state at at least 20. The figures come from different sources with different methodologies, so they should be read as a range.
Three Fayetteville officers were among those dismissed for unauthorized searches through the system. Their cases, along with the Albany firings, show a pattern of officers using a law enforcement surveillance tool to track individuals outside any legitimate investigation.
How the audit tool works
Flock Safety records every search in a permanent audit log. The AI layer sits on top of that log, identifies search patterns that fall outside normal agency usage, and surfaces those anomalies for supervisors. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on the system in late June, describing it as an audit-assistance tool rather than an automated enforcement mechanism. Supervisors still make the final call.
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The tool does not discipline officers. It creates a paper trail and flags outliers for human review, and whether agencies act on those flags depends on institutional will rather than software.
The transparency gap
Officer names are removed from the publicly accessible audit logs. The same system generating internal accountability data limits the information available to journalists, oversight bodies, and the public.
Flock has positioned the audit tool as a privacy and safety measure, and the firings in Albany and Fayetteville show it can produce real consequences. A log that names officers internally while anonymizing them externally routes accountability through the company and agency leadership, not public scrutiny.
What comes next
The audit tool is already deployed and producing outcomes. The open question is whether Georgia legislators or municipal oversight bodies will require agencies to publish non-anonymized disciplinary records tied to surveillance misuse. No such requirement has been reported as pending. The accumulation of cases, and a tool that now documents them systematically, gives any future legislative push a concrete evidentiary foundation.