ALBANY, Ga. (WALB) — Albany Police Chief Michael Persley said an upgraded audit system within the department’s FLOCK license plate reader network detected illegal use by five officers, leading to their firing and criminal charges.

>> PREVIOUS COVERAGE: 5 APD officers fired over misuse of license plate reader technology, department says <<

Chief Persley said the FLOCK system recently upgraded its monitoring capabilities, which directly led to the case against the five officers.

“When an audit was conducted on the system, and it found that certain parameters had been exploited or breached in the search data, and what we found were that the officers in question had put license plate numbers into the ALPR system and did searches on those tags to see where they had been,” Persley said. “Now, each person who did it, it wasn’t random people they were looking for. These are people who they personally knew.”

System alerted supervisors, investigation launched within days

The FLOCK system now continuously monitors for unauthorized use. If a breach occurs, supervisors at the Albany Police Department (APD) receive an automatic alert from the system.

Persley said the department acted within days of the alert.

“At that point, we launched the internal investigation into it and simultaneously contacted—after discussing this with the district attorney’s office, we reached out to the GBI and requested them to come do the criminal investigation of this,” Persley said. “As we went through and we looked at from the administrative side of it, we did see that there were misuses of this information. So we started a process for termination, I want to say, about three, four days after it was initially found.”

Citizens’ privacy compromised, chief says

Persley confirmed that the individuals the five former officers allegedly searched were not part of any active investigation or call for service.

“To the ones who they did search, yes, it did [compromise their privacy],” Persley said. “None of these were tied to an active investigation or a call for service. And so with that, that puts a big dent in the trust that the community has with law enforcement using this technology.”

Department adds training, weekly audits going forward

In addition to the FLOCK system’s automatic monitoring, APD plans to conduct its own internal audits on a weekly basis. Incoming officers will also receive explicit training on the prohibited uses of the system.

“Whenever something like this happens, you got to add it to our field training process of, you know, teaching new people coming to the organization,” Persley said. “‘Hey, this is what you don’t do. And this is what it’s for, but this is what you don’t do.’ And we want to make sure that, whether it’s this system or some other system, that we don’t have these breaches again.”

Persley said investigators must follow strict guidelines when using FLOCK, even for individuals who are under investigation, or risk termination and criminal charges.

Because the investigation is ongoing, Persley said he could not comment further on the specifics of the allegations against the officers.

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