Georgia Deputies Used Flock's Plate Cameras to Stalk People They Knew. Fifteen Officers Are Now Charged, Fired, or Dismissed.
Bot Mutiny |
A monthly audit in Bibb County led to felony stalking charges against three deputies, part of a statewide wave of at least fifteen Georgia law enforcement personnel implicated in plate-reader misuse.
The people being tracked were not suspects. According to the Bibb County Sheriff's Office, they were people the deputies knew personally: current or former relationships, run through a national license plate surveillance network built for criminal investigations.
Three Bibb County deputies, Coznavian Stubbs, Joseph Callaway, and Toni Lewis, were arrested on August 10 and booked into the Bibb County jail, as first reported by Georgia Public Broadcasting. A monthly audit of the office's Flock Safety camera queries found searches with no law enforcement purpose. All three deputies have resigned. Each faces at least one felony stalking count; Callaway, a former K-9 deputy, faces three.
Sheriff David Davis told 13WMAZ: "These deputies here made a terrible mistake."
A discrepancy worth noting
The full charge lists vary slightly across outlets, which is worth noting because it rarely gets noted. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports charges of stalking, prohibited use of a traffic control device, and violation of oath. 13WMAZ reports violation of oath, unlawful retention of license plate data, and stalking. CBS Atlanta adds that Callaway was charged with improperly requesting or sharing criminal history information. All outlets agree on the core: sworn officers, felony stalking counts, personal targets. Charging documents will settle the rest.
A statewide pattern, not one office
Bibb County is not an isolated case. It is the visible edge of a statewide pattern. Georgia Public Broadcasting reports the arrests came amid similar investigations across Georgia: five officers arrested in Albany and six people dismissed from the Savannah Police Department during a Flock misuse inquiry. WGXA reports a Conyers police dispatcher was also arrested and fired. Counted together, that is at least fifteen Georgia law enforcement personnel arrested, charged, or dismissed over plate-reader misuse in a matter of weeks.
The part that should worry everyone else
Here is the detail that should worry anyone outside Georgia: these cases surfaced because Georgia agencies started auditing. Bibb County's monthly audit is a local policy decision, not a legal requirement. Flock Safety contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, according to a November 2025 congressional letter to the FTC, and no federal rule requires any of them to review their query logs on any schedule.
What the record establishes: officers used a national surveillance network to track people in their personal lives, and were caught by audits their own agencies chose to run. What it does not establish: what happens at the agencies that never look. The tools that found these cases, public audit logs compiled by projects like DeFlock and Have I Been Flocked, exist because volunteers and a nonprofit filed the records requests nobody else did.
If your city has Flock cameras, the question is no longer whether the system can be abused. Georgia answered that. The question is whether anyone in your city is reading the log.