Cherokee County, Ga. Sgt. Mike Creeden arrested on felony charge for misusing sheriff's office license-plate reader database

On June 22, 2026, the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office in Georgia arrested and fired Sgt. Mike Creeden, 35, of Cartersville, after an internal audit of the agency's Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) system found he had used it for non-law-enforcement purposes. Creeden was charged with one felony count of violation of oath of office and one misdemeanor count of unlawfully retaining license-plate-reader data obtained through the system, and was booked into the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center on a $3,812 bond. The arrest followed a self-initiated audit by the sheriff's office's Real-Time Intelligence Division, undertaken to verify that ALPR use complied with agency policy and state law; the same audit round also led to the arrest of Lt. Chris Bryant, an independently caught case of separate misuse of the same system, and followed the earlier arrest of Deputy Cynthia Jodesty over a separate, unrelated search.

Under Georgia Code Section 35-1-22, license-plate-reader data collected by law enforcement may be accessed only for official law-enforcement purposes, and knowingly using it for personal reasons is itself a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature. Sheriff Frank Reynolds said in a statement that "maintaining the public's trust requires that our employees uphold the law, safeguard sensitive information, and use the tools entrusted to us only for legitimate law enforcement purposes."

The sheriff's office has not disclosed whose license plates Creeden searched, how many searches he made, or what motivated the searches; officials have said only that a detailed investigation determined the queries served no law-enforcement purpose. What the agency has confirmed is the unauthorized access itself, not its purpose -- the specific target and motive remain undisclosed as of this record.