Flock Safety’s cameras photograph a plate, a timestamp and a location for every vehicle that rolls past. A Washington Post review published on October 21 found that the accounts which unlock that archive often outlived the officers who once held them.
The paper counted at least 11 cases where people without authority reached the database, which draws on more than 120,000 roadside cameras.
Four involved credentials still working after a departure or during a suspension. Six others came down to password sharing between agencies, which officials later ruled broke state law, department policy or Flock’s own contracts.
The clearest case is Andrae Wright, who left Georgia’s Effingham County Sheriff’s Office in 2021. His login kept working for five more years. After an internal audit, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said he ran more than 60 searches between June 15 and July 5 that had nothing to do with police work, including repeats on a vanity plate carrying his wife’s middle name. The couple divorced this year. He now faces stalking, computer invasion of privacy and oath violation charges.
In Indianapolis, a recruit used a senior officer’s still-open session to run more than 1,000 searches on his estranged wife’s plate over twelve months. Five officers were charged there last month after an agencywide audit.
Sharing was routine elsewhere. Covington, Louisiana’s chief discovered a predecessor had opened access to state police and two neighbouring agencies. Cobb County, Georgia found roughly 200 of 900 sheriff’s staff, jailers included, could search, and later cut that to about 50.
Flock made multifactor authentication mandatory in August and plans to force re-login every 12 hours next year.
