A Georgia business owner is suing Flock and his local sheriff's office, claiming deputies used license plate cameras to track him for months for no legitimate reason.
Tyler Murkerson's attorneys say Coweta County deputies ran illegal license plate tracking searches on him for months, without probable cause and unconnected to any real investigation. The lawsuit names both the sheriff's office and Flock, the company behind the automated license plate reader network many departments now use. Murkerson's lawyers argue Flock enabled the abuse by letting officers type any free text justification into a search instead of requiring a specific case number. It is not Murkerson's first clash with the department: he was arrested in February 2023 over an alleged seatbelt violation that was later dropped, then sued the sheriff's office for excessive force in September 2024, a case that just settled.
The complaint points at a structural weakness in how license plate reader networks get policed: an audit trail is only as good as the fields officers are required to fill in, and a free text box is trivial to game. Flock has built one of the largest private license plate surveillance networks in the country by selling access to thousands of local agencies, so a ruling here could shape how much discretion officers get nationwide.
If the allegations hold up, the bigger problem isn't the officers who allegedly misused the system. It's the vendor that made misuse this easy to paper over.