A Savannah, Georgia, police officer lost her job after giving her Flock login to her husband, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who used it to run hundreds of license plate searches on people his agency wanted to find. Former Savannah Police Department (SPD) officer Amber Harpe handed her username and password to Tyler Harpe because he had no Flock account through the Department of Homeland Security, according to internal records obtained by local news outlet WJCL. Savannah police don’t share their Flock data with ICE.

The case is a clear example of one of Flock critics’ longstanding fears: federal immigration agents getting into local camera networks without any formal agreement. It also extends a long run of stories about police misusing Flock’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and Georgia has supplied more than its share of those incidents. In recent months, police employees in Savannah, Milton, Augusta, and Coweta County have been fired, arrested, and even sued over how they used the system.

Initially, an internal audit flagged unusually heavy search activity on Amber Harpe’s account between January and July. Auditors counted 983 search entries covering 97 plates from Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina. South Carolina dominated, accounting for 788 of those searches, and investigators found that most of the registered owners of the vehicles associated with searches in the South Carolina group were Hispanic, according to WJCL.

In a July 27th interview, Harpe told investigators she didn’t recognize many of the names and that her husband had run most of the searches.

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