Former Albany, Georgia officer Nicholas Richardson charged with 11 counts of Flock license-plate data misuse

On July 6, 2026, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced it had arrested and charged former Albany, Georgia police officer Nicholas Richardson, 30, with eleven counts of misuse of license plate data and one count of violation of oath of office, following an internal Albany Police Department audit of its Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) system. Richardson's eleven counts were the highest of the five officers charged in the case.

The Albany Police Department requested the GBI investigation on June 25, 2026, after an internal audit of the Flock system found several officers had accessed it on multiple occasions and used the retained plate data for non-law-enforcement purposes. Richardson was no longer employed by the department and was booked into the Dougherty County Jail on July 6, alongside Tytianna Davis, Jade Jackson, Brittney Smith, and Issac Whitus — each separately charged in the same audit and recorded here as their own entries, since each independently misused the system rather than acting together.

Albany Police Chief Michael Persley said all five officers had been terminated, but attributed three of the firings to the license-plate-reader misuse and two to earlier, unrelated policy violations, without identifying which officers fell into which group. [2]

Flock's automated license-plate-reader network, deployed by thousands of law-enforcement agencies nationwide, logs plate scans that are retained and searchable by officers who enter a stated reason for each query; nothing in the system stops an officer from running a search for a personal, non-law-enforcement purpose, and misuse is caught only after the fact, through audits or complaints. Albany Police Chief Michael Persley said, "The bottom line is when we find people who have misused resources, we're going to hold them accountable." The GBI investigation remains active, with the case to be referred to the Dougherty Judicial Circuit District Attorney's Office for prosecution.