Six Savannah Police Department employees misused Flock license-plate camera system for personal searches; all fired

On August 7, 2026, the Savannah Police Department announced it had terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees following an internal investigation into misuse of the department's Flock Safety license-plate-reader system, with all six cases also referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for independent criminal review.

The misuse was identified through SPD's audit of Flock Safety activity, including the vendor's Audit Assist tool, made available in April 2026. SPD's audit-assist tool flagged 127 of the department's roughly 39,000 Flock searches in 2026; officers manually reviewed each flagged alert and determined 34 were unjustified, implicating six staff members. The administrative investigation, opened July 27, 2026, found the employees ran searches on personal acquaintances and family members for reasons unrelated to legitimate law enforcement activity, and that one officer gave someone from an outside law-enforcement agency unauthorized access to SPD's Flock system.

Following the terminations, SPD implemented recurring weekly audits by its Office of Professional Standards. Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said the city self-reported the misconduct rather than it surfacing through outside discovery, and that the names of the six have not been released because of the pending GBI criminal investigation and an employee appeals process; the city said it will disclose more information when legally permissible. The GBI's independent review remained open as of this recording.

The episode is one of several documented cases in which officers with authorized access to license-plate-reader networks used them to track people for personal reasons rather than legitimate investigations, a pattern the archive tracks across departments and vendors.