Sandy Springs, Ga. reserve sergeant terminated for misusing Flock cameras to benefit private company

Sandy Springs, Georgia terminated reserve Sgt. Francis Esposito, effective August 20, 2025, after an internal affairs investigation into possible misconduct. Sandy Springs Police spokesperson Sgt. Leon Millholland said Esposito was terminated after he failed to cooperate with that investigation; the department's termination letter cited policy violations of abuse of position and authority, common sense and judgment, and conduct unbecoming.

The investigation stemmed from Esposito's access to the department's Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader system. He used his city Flock login to run license-plate searches on multiple people and allegedly transferred the resulting data to Signal 8, a company he separately worked for, conduct investigators said may have violated Georgia law, including its corporate-espionage statute. As a reserve officer, Esposito was an unpaid volunteer who, per department policy, held the same system access and was bound by the same standards as full-time sworn officers.

Signal 8 denied receiving any Flock or city data from Esposito, saying in a statement that "at no point did Mr. Esposito share, transmit, or transfer data from Flock Safety or the City of Sandy Springs to Signal 8 Systems." Sandy Springs referred the case to the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council, which can bar Esposito from law enforcement in the state; no criminal charges had been filed as of the most recent reporting.

The case is the latest instance of a pattern this archive tracks under the alpr-personal-misuse-by-officers episode: an officer's standing access to a license-plate database used for a private, non-law-enforcement purpose. As in other cases in the pattern, the misuse surfaced only through an internal investigation after the fact, not through any safeguard built into the system that stopped it as it happened.