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A former investigator with the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia kept using the Flock nationwide license plate camera system for five years after he left his job as an investigator, and used it to search for his wife’s plate, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Andrae Wright, a former investigator for the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office, left the office in 2021, but logged into the Flock system to search for a license plate bearing his wife’s middle name more than 60 times over a five-year span, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation statements and audit records. Some of the searches were conducted while Wright was trying to gain permanent custody of the couple’s teenage daughter, the Post learned. Wright and his wife divorced this year. He was arrested in July and charged with stalking his wife, using information from Flock “for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her,” according to his warrant. Wright did not return a call for comment for the Post’s story. The sheriff’s office said it had not regularly reviewed account access and plans to begin audits.

The Post investigation identified 11 cases of unauthorized use of Flock license plate readers, a network of at least 120,000 cameras nationwide. In 4 of the cases, police officers continued to use the system after they left their jobs or while they were on suspension from their jobs. In 6 additional cases, logins or access were shared with officers from other police departments.

The Post also reported on a case out of Fulton County, where an investigation was launched into the actions of a former police officer over suspected Flock license plate searches after she had left her employment with the department. The department shared its Flock subscription with the sheriff’s office, and no one notified the sheriff’s office to revoke her access when she resigned from her job. “They didn’t remove the employee,” Police Chief Wade Yates told the paper. “I’ll take the heat for that.”

In Cobb County, the sheriff’s office cut its Flock accounts from some 200 users to about 50, and only those 50 are now considered to be authorized to use the system. The review found that a number of employees had been given login information to the system for no work-related purpose, and the review found no apparent misuse.

The Post revealed the worst case of abuse of the system in a story about Indianapolis. A police recruit named Matthew Binford used a senior police officer’s account to enter the plate of his estranged wife on the Flock system over 1,000 times in one year, according to a court affidavit obtained by the paper. The senior officer had opened Flock on Binford’s laptop and left the session active, the affidavit stated, and Binford kept access for more than two years. Binford and four other current and former Indianapolis police officers were charged last month, after a Post inquiry prompted a department-wide audit. He declined to comment.

Three former Flock employees told the Post that the company has pushed back against additional security measures. Two of them said leadership had concerns that additional security would negatively impact sales to law enforcement agencies. While Flock’s contracts stipulate that accounts be created using official agency email addresses, the company acknowledged that it began to actively enforce this only recently. Multi-factor authentication was made the default setting in 2024, though agencies could opt out, and was made mandatory in August of this year. In the wake of the Post’s findings, Flock said it is working with customers to remove personal email addresses and other forms of shared login credentials from Flock accounts. As of next year, users will have to log back in every 12 hours. Company spokesman Paris Lewbel said Flock acts when it identifies security weaknesses or policy violations. The company declined to comment on individual cases, however.

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