Officers could face penalties beyond firing as prosecutors assess whether their prior testimony and arrests can still be trusted.
Three Charlotte police officers have stepped down and another trio are queued for dismissal after a Flock probe surfaced a group chat filled with racist remarks, religious and sexual bias, and what has been described as a competition to see who could arrest the most Black people.
The conversations became public after Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) officer Seth Elliott was found to have used Flock’s database to reveal an undercover officer to his drug-dealing friend, launching an investigation by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (NCSBI).
When questioned by the NCSBI, Elliott, who has since resigned, admitted he ran the plate but denied knowing that it belonged to an undercover officer. He told agents that his associate had asked if Elliott could help identify a suspicious person near his father’s business, which led Elliott to search the plate in Flock’s database. According to reporting from the Watauga Democrat, the NCSBI arrested Elliott in July and charged him with “illegally accessing a government computer, a Class 1 misdemeanor.”
During its inquiry into Elliott, the NCSBI downloaded data from his phone, which it then passed to CMPD, where a subsequent review uncovered the racist text thread. According to anonymous sources who spoke with Charlotte’s WBTV, the group chat included “numerous uses of the ‘n-word’ related to use of force and discharging firearms at black residents,” and a contest to determine who could arrest the most Black people. In one message reportedly written by a member of the group, an officer stated, “Our texts sound like a clan [sic] rally,” according to a report reviewed by WCNC Charlotte, a local NBC affiliate. At a Thursday press conference, CMPD Police Chief Estella Patterson announced that an independent chain-of-command board had unanimously voted to terminate the officers. Three had already resigned, and she said she “hopes to refer to as former employees” the remaining three.
The ripple effects will extend beyond the personnel losses. Every case these officers touched could now be reexamined, and for solid reasons. In Giglio v. United States (1972), the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must disclose information that could undermine the credibility of a government witness or law enforcement officer. Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather will need to review the messages and decide whether those officers’ accounts can still be trusted as witnesses. Depending on his ruling, this could result in dropped cases and appeals of prior convictions.
Defense attorney Tim Emery weighed in, telling WBTV that the officers’ “credibility is severely questioned and compromised,” and that the district attorney’s office should consider pausing cases in which the officers played a central role.
Misuse of Flock and other automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) by police is not a novel issue. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, has documented more than 200 instances of ALPR misuse by law enforcement since 2018. In the past year alone, officers have been found using ALPRs for everything from personal vendettas to stalking former partners and romantic interests. This time, the victim of Flock misuse was an undercover officer rather than a civilian.
