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Former Covington, Ga. officer arrested for Flock camera misuse, oath-of-office violation

On August 27, 2026, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested former Covington Police Department officer Michael Canty, 29, on charges of misuse of a license plate reader system and violation of oath of office. The Covington Police Department had asked the GBI on August 6, 2026 to investigate allegations that Canty misused his Flock Safety system access; the GBI said its preliminary investigation found Canty accessed the Flock system for non-law-enforcement purposes.

Part of: Police Using License-Plate Camera Networks to Stalk

Jurisdiction
Georgia
Location
Covington, Georgia

Abuses documented

Actors

  • Michael Canty (former Covington Police Department officer)

On August 27, 2026, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested former Covington Police Department officer Michael Canty, 29, on charges of misuse of a license plate reader system and violation of oath of office. The Covington Police Department had asked the GBI on August 6, 2026 to investigate allegations that Canty's access to the department's Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader system had been misused.

In a statement, the GBI said its preliminary investigation indicated that Canty accessed the Flock system for non-law-enforcement purposes. The agency has not released further details on the case, and the investigation remains open.

The arrest is the latest in a recurring pattern of officers around the country using standing access to Flock's license-plate database for personal reasons unrelated to any official duty, a pattern this archive tracks under the alpr-personal-misuse-by-officers episode. As in prior cases, the misuse was caught only after a referral to an outside investigative body rather than by any safeguard built into the system itself.

Why we recorded this

Access to a government license-plate surveillance network is authorized for law-enforcement purposes, not personal ones. Former Covington, Georgia police officer Michael Canty used the department's Flock Safety camera system to search license plates for reasons unrelated to any official duty, and was arrested on the department's own request that the state investigate. This archive records the event because it is another instance of a recurring failure mode: an officer's standing access to a surveillance database went unchecked until after the fact, and only an internal referral — not the system's own safeguards — caught it.

Sources

  1. Former Covington police officer arrested for alleged Flock camera misuse — Atlanta News First primary accessed September 3, 2026

See also