Cherokee County, Ga. deputy arrested, fired for entering coworker's plate into Flock database

On June 12, 2026, the Cherokee County, Georgia Sheriff's Office arrested and fired Deputy Cynthia Jodesty after an internal audit of the agency's Flock automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) system found she had entered the license plate of a fellow sheriff's office employee into the database while, in the agency's words, performing a "non-legitimate law enforcement function." Jodesty, 30, had been assigned to the Uniformed Patrol Division. She was booked into the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center on one felony count of violation of oath of office and one misdemeanor count of prohibition on law enforcement retaining license-plate data obtained from an ALPR, and released the same night on a $3,812 bond. Sheriff's Office spokesperson Capt. Jay Baker said officials had not disclosed why Jodesty searched the coworker's plate or how long the unauthorized access continued before the audit caught it.

Georgia law (O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22) limits ALPR data collection and access to official law-enforcement purposes and makes personal use a high-and-aggravated misdemeanor; a public officer's willful violation of their oath of office in the course of that conduct is a separate felony. Jodesty's arrest was the first in an expanding, self-initiated Real-Time Intelligence Division audit at the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office: ten days later, Lt. Chris Bryant and Sgt. Mike Creeden were separately arrested and fired after the same review turned up additional unauthorized searches, and a fourth deputy, Jerry Shellhouse, was arrested in August. Investigators described each employee's searches as their own, separate misuse rather than a joint act, so this archive records Jodesty's case on its own; Bryant's and Creeden's arrests are recorded as separate entries.