Michael Soyfer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, describes it as “only a glimpse of a much larger problem.”
Arrests in Georgia for the misuse of Flock Safety’s surveillance system by public officers continued to rise this week, reaching no fewer than twenty across the state.
On Monday, Andrae Wright was detained and charged for allegedly accessing the license plate reader system more than 60 times between June 15 and July 5 while working as an investigator with the Ogeechee Circuit District Attorney’s Office near Savannah, reports WSB-TV Atlanta. And on Friday, the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office in northern Georgia announced that Deputy Christian Brewer had been terminated and arrested for allegedly abusing license plate data. The misusage, according to NowGeorgia.com, involved “an individual with whom Brewer had a personal relationship at the time.”
To prevent incidents like these, Flock Safety—the largest provider of automatic license plate readers (ALPR) in the country with more than 120,000 cameras nationwide—rolled out its Audit Assistance tool in April. And according to a statement from the company last week, its new trust and compliance tool “has helped several agencies identify misuse cases that might otherwise have gone undetected.”
Yet privacy and police accountability experts point to an evident reason why so much abuse goes unnoticed not only in Georgia but across the country: there is almost no supervision of police searches of license plate data. In practice, license plate data searches by law enforcement are routinely conducted without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a warrant.
What is happening in Georgia is “just the tip of the iceberg,” says Michael Soyfer, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.) who focuses on Fourth Amendment cases. There are almost certainly more cases of law enforcement abuse of this nature lurking, according to Soyfer, who views this as a widespread threat to Americans’ constitutional rights.
Soyfer remains skeptical about whether Flock Safety’s auditing tool will curb the abuse. “There isn’t much public information on how they work,” he said, comparing the capability to a “black box” and noting that “Flock’s ultimate customer is the police department.” Relying on these tools, Soyfer argues, is essentially “leaving the police to police themselves.”
Setting aside the obvious conflicts of interest, Soyfer contends that at this point, law enforcement agencies are conducting so many warrantless searches within Flock Safety’s license plate data that it would be “impossible to detect all misuse.” In a lawsuit filed in April against the city of San Jose, California, I.J. found that data collected from San Jose’s network of 474 Flock cameras was searched “nearly 2.5 million times in the last six months of 2025, an average of over 15,000 searches per day,” all with almost no oversight.
Additionally, officers using license plate data often provide remarkably scant details when performing searches, sometimes offering reasons as vague as a generic “criminal justice,” according to Soyfer. Misuse simply can’t be detected without officers furnishing critical details as to why they are searching the data in the first place, he continued.
But even if Flock Safety’s auditing tools were used correctly and consistently, it would still amount to just “a game of Whac-A-Mole,” says Soyfer. And when it comes to safeguarding Americans’ constitutional rights, “it’s reactive rather than proactive.”
Alternatively, Soyfer asserts “the Constitution spells out safeguards when police intrude on personal privacy,” including requiring a warrant before conducting a search. And while it’s an evolving legal question as to whether police mining license plate data counts as a search under the Fourth Amendment, a question complicated by recent Supreme Court rulings, Soyfer remains firm that, in his view, license plate data searches do not fall under the relatively small number of recognized warrant-exemption exceptions.
The “inefficiency” embedded in the warrant requirement to slow police down, Soyfer argues, is intentional. “It’s meant to be prophylactic,” he continued, preventing rights violations before they occur. But to date, courts have refused to require law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant before searching license plate data.
