Power tools in bad hands cause massive damage. When three Bibb County sheriff's deputies got arrested for tracking people with automated license plate readers, it wasn't a total shock. It was just the latest predictable failure of modern police surveillance tech.
Coznavian Stubbs, Joseph Callaway, and Toni Lewis lost their jobs and caught criminal charges because they treated a statewide tracking database like a personal relationship tracker. They aren't anomalies. Across Georgia and the rest of the country, officers keep getting caught using automated surveillance tools to spy on romantic partners, exes, and acquaintances.
How Flock Cameras Turn Public Streets into Private Trackers
Flock Safety builds automated license plate reading cameras that sit quietly on suburban street corners and highway poles. They take crisp photos of every passing car, log the license plate, capture vehicle characteristics, and feed that data into a massive, searchable cloud database.
Police departments love them. They help track stolen cars, locate wanted suspects, and solve major crimes fast.
The dark side is simple. Any officer with login credentials can type a license plate number into the portal and see where that vehicle has traveled over weeks or months. You don't need a warrant to type a query into an internal database. You just need an active login.
When you hand human beings frictionless access to a digital tracking network, some of them will use it for personal vendettas. That is what happened in Macon. An internal audit flagged suspicious queries, the agency dug deeper, and the arrests followed.
The Illusion of Internal Audits
Sheriff David Davis pointed out that internal safeguards caught these deputies. That sounds reassuring. It means the system works, right?
Not really.
An internal audit only catches misuse after it happens. It doesn't stop a jealous deputy from spending an hour tracking an estranged spouse's morning commute before anyone notices the pattern. By the time an audit flags the behavior, the privacy violation is already complete. The victim has already been stalked by someone wearing a badge and carrying a gun.
Other departments are finding the exact same vulnerabilities. Agencies in metro Atlanta and coastal cities have launched their own internal reviews after discovering similar employee misconduct. Officers are resigning or getting fired left and right for running unauthorized lookups.
The technology isn't failing. The oversight model is broken.
Fixing the Surveillance State Inside Local Police Departments
If law enforcement agencies want to keep using high-tech dragnet systems, the rules have to change drastically. Real-time monitoring needs to replace passive post-audit checks.
Here is what needs to happen immediately:
- Mandatory two-person authorization for sensitive plate queries involving personal acquaintances.
- Real-time anomaly detection alerts that trigger the moment a search matches an officer's home address, family members, or known associates.
- Immediate automatic account suspension upon any flagged query pending an independent review.
If police departments refuse to lock down these databases with strict technological guardrails, cameras meant to keep communities safe will keep getting used to terrorize private citizens. The public shouldn't have to wait for the next internal audit to find out who is tracking them.
