---
title: "Georgia Man Sues Flock and Sheriff Over Alleged Retaliatory Plate Tracking"
description: "Deputies logged searches as “info” and “37” while his civil-rights suit against the sheriff was still pending, a new complaint says"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-14T19:53:01Z
modified: 2026-10-15T03:36:15Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/georgia-man-sues-flock-and-sheriff-over-alleged-retaliatory--67c51e
language: en
tags: ["surveillance", "police", "privacy", "law", "ai", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Georgia Man Sues Flock and Sheriff Over Alleged Retaliatory Plate Tracking

*Deputies logged searches as “info” and “37” while his civil-rights suit against the sheriff was still pending, a new complaint says*

By Luis Goa · October 14, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/georgia-man-sues-flock-and-sheriff-over-alleged-retaliatory--67c51e

## In brief

- Tyler Murkerson sues Flock, Coweta County and deputies alleging ALPR searches retaliated for his earlier civil-rights suit against the sheriff
- Deputies logged search reasons as “info” and “37” for five Flock queries on his car between May and November 2025, each reaching 6,000+ camera networks
- Three Coweta County Sheriff’s Office employees resigned before an internal Flock audit, begun in August 2026, was completed
- Washington Post reporting found Flock’s system involved in 46 of at least 50 nationwide plate-reader misuse cases, mostly involving romantic targets
- Trackers put 2026 Flock contract cancellations at 50 (AP), 149 (DeFlock) or 214 since 2021 (Secure Justice), depending on methodology

“info.” “37.” Those are the two search reasons Coweta County Sheriff’s Office deputies entered into Flock Safety’s license-plate network to pull up Tyler Murkerson’s 2024 Toyota Camry, according to a federal lawsuit filed October 8 in the Northern District of Georgia, as [Ars Technica reported](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/georgia-man-sues-flock-sheriffs-office-over-alleged-alpr-fueled-retaliation/). Neither code corresponds to a case number, an incident report, or any investigation that named Murkerson, the complaint alleges. Flock’s own audit logs show his plate was queried five times between May 4 and November 18, 2025 — a span during which Murkerson’s unrelated 2024 civil-rights suit against the same sheriff’s office was still working its way through the same court.

Each of those five queries didn’t just check Coweta County’s own cameras. Flock’s architecture defaults to nationwide reciprocity: an officer’s search runs against every agency camera network that hasn’t opted out, which the complaint puts at more than 6,000 networks per query. [The Washington Post reported in August](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-police-officers-used-vast-network-cameras-spy-their-exes/) that Flock now operates more than 120,000 cameras across over 6,000 communities, logging roughly 20 billion plate scans a month. A deputy typing a single-character reason code isn’t searching one county’s footage. He’s searching most of the country’s.

## What the complaint says happened

Murkerson’s dispute with Coweta County goes back to February 2023, when deputies stopped him at a gas station over an alleged seatbelt violation — a law that does not apply on private property — and, he says, forced him to the ground and used a Taser on him. Prosecutors dismissed the charges in June 2023. Murkerson sued Sheriff Lenn Wood and two deputies, Christopher Teare and Radford Brooks, in September 2024. That suit was dismissed with prejudice around August 2026.

**The sequence the complaint alleges** From a 2023 traffic stop to this month's retaliation suit

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Feb. 2023 stop *(seatbelt stop, Taser used)* | Charges dismissed *(June 2023)* |  |
| Charges dismissed *(June 2023)* | Murkerson sues Sheriff Wood *(Sept. 2024)* |  |
| Murkerson sues Sheriff Wood *(Sept. 2024)* | 5 Flock searches logged *(May–Nov. 2025, reasons "info"/"37")* | while suit pending |
| 5 Flock searches logged *(May–Nov. 2025, reasons "info"/"37")* | 6,000+ camera networks queried *(per search, nationwide)* |  |
| Murkerson sues Sheriff Wood *(Sept. 2024)* | First suit dismissed *(with prejudice, Aug. 2026)* |  |
| First suit dismissed *(with prejudice, Aug. 2026)* | Murkerson checks HaveIBeenFlocked.com |  |
| Murkerson checks HaveIBeenFlocked.com | New suit filed *(Oct. 8, 2026, alleges retaliation)* |  |

![The sequence the complaint alleges. From a 2023 traffic stop to this month's retaliation suit](https://rews.cc/img/06e24a94a66818eafc2dbfbfd6fca58ec3a5d1e4.webp)

Based on [complaint filed in N.D. Ga., via Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/georgia-man-sues-flock-sheriffs-office-over-alleged-alpr-fueled-retaliation/)

Only two of the five searches have disclosed operators, logged under the accounts “r.fau” and “w.fau,” which the complaint says belong to deputies Randall and William Faulkner — no relation to the deputies named in the first suit. [Gizmodo reported](https://gizmodo.com/georgia-man-says-deputies-used-flock-cameras-to-track-him-after-he-sued-sheriff-2000824987) that the complaint alleges William Faulkner used the code “37” for most of his Flock activity and, across thousands of his own searches on the system, entered an actual case number only four times. Murkerson learned about the five queries on his own plate only after his first case ended, by checking HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a site that republishes Flock audit logs obtained through public-records requests. His new suit, filed against Flock Group Inc., Coweta County, Sheriff Wood, the two Faulkners and three unnamed employees, seeks damages plus an order purging the records, pulling his plate off any watch list, and requiring Georgia agencies to validate the search reasons they log.

The Coweta County Sheriff’s Office opened its own internal audit of Flock use in August 2026, the same month Flock announced its policy overhaul industry-wide. The complaint notes that three sheriff’s office employees resigned before that audit was completed. The office’s public statement, as reported by [TechSpot](https://www.techspot.com/news/114184-flock-faces-lawsuit-after-deputies-allegedly-used-cameras.html), says it expects “every employee... to use them in a manner that is lawful, ethical and in accordance with agency policy.” It did not respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment on the new lawsuit.

> “What’s really troubling is when that type of surveillance is available, so that the police can do Fourth Amendment-implicated searches without any controls.”

![A surveillance camera casts a long, hand-shaped shadow reaching around a small cream-colored car against a yellow background.](https://rews.cc/img/936938c94988203e68b462d934d1bfce5a9d2ab5.webp)

That’s Chris Hall, one of Murkerson’s attorneys, describing the theory of the case to Ars Technica. His point isn’t that photographing a plate is itself a search — courts have generally treated a single photo of a car in public as no different from an officer’s own eyes. His point is what the aggregation does: a queryable, nationwide, months-deep history of everywhere a specific car has been, pulled by typing almost nothing into a box. “This is focused on illegal activity,” Hall said, “and what we allege is that they did violate Georgia law and violate the Fourth Amendment — because it’s a search and surveillance put on somebody.” Flock told Ars it “stands by the integrity of its technology and the important role it plays in helping law enforcement solve crimes, find missing people, and keep communities safe,” and said it would “vigorously defend” against the claims.

## The fix that wasn’t running yet

Flock announced a company-wide [set of guardrails on August 13](https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-guardrails-address-lpr-privacy-concerns-and-police-transparency): case codes, optional since a July 2025 pilot, become mandatory for every law-enforcement search by the end of 2026; default data retention drops from 30 days to seven, which Flock justifies by its own finding that more than 90% of searches without a complete plate number are resolved within a week; an “Audit Assistance” tool that flags and can auto-suspend unusual search activity becomes mandatory for all police customers by year end; and a new “offense filtering” option lets a community block specific outside agencies or purposes, including immigration enforcement, from querying its cameras. None of that was in force during the May–November 2025 window the complaint describes. A code like “37” wouldn’t have been blocked; it would only, eventually, have been flagged for a human to review.

![A dark blue open padlock with a cream arched shackle stands beside a yellow key on a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/04a7529d110bc02d3613b9aadff74c419b0622e4.webp)

Whether that review catches anything is a separate, open question. [The New Bedford Light reported](https://newbedfordlight.org/fall-river-police-entered-vague-nonsensical-reasons-for-flock-searches/) that in Fall River, Massachusetts, officers attached a real case or reference number to roughly 9% of searches in July 2026 — in line with under 10% for the first half of the year, and under 3% across 2021–2025 — before that share jumped to about 70% in August, once Flock’s year-end mandate was announced. Even after the jump, three in ten Fall River searches that month still carried no verifiable reference. A mandate that agencies know is coming changes behavior faster than one that’s merely optional, but it doesn’t close the gap to zero, and Coweta County’s own audit — the mechanism that was supposed to catch exactly this kind of entry — stalled before three employees who might have had something to say about it walked out the door.

Murkerson’s case is one entry in a pattern [the Washington Post’s reporting](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-police-officers-used-vast-network-cameras-spy-their-exes/) made public in August: at least 50 law-enforcement officers nationwide charged with or accused of misusing plate-reader access, Flock’s system involved in 46 of those cases, and in 26 of the 46 the target was a wife, girlfriend, ex-partner, or someone else the officer had taken a romantic interest in. That reporting had direct consequences: Marion County, Indiana, prosecutors criminally charged five current and former Indianapolis police officers in September, which [the Post followed up on](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/23/five-indianapolis-officers-charged-following-posts-reporting-flock-misuse/), with prosecutor Ryan Mears crediting the paper directly: “A lot of this was initiated by The Washington Post.” Murkerson’s complaint is the first of this wave to allege the motive wasn’t romantic obsession but retaliation against someone who had sued the department — a different use of the same mechanism.

![A large dark blue computer mouse shaped like a gun has a cord looping around a small white human figure against a yellow background.](https://rews.cc/img/9d7f26d90832c9fe6e7e17c0f50b6aaeb2f44696.webp)

The misuse reporting has fed a separate, harder-to-pin-down number: how many of Flock’s customers are leaving. Trackers run by advocacy groups disagree sharply on the count, because they define “leaving” differently — a non-renewal, a deactivation and an outright rejection of a new proposal aren’t the same event, and not every tracker separates them.

[Secure Justice’s tracker](https://secure-justice.org/flock-termination-tracker) counts 214 communities ending a Flock relationship since 2021, with 93 of those in August 2026 alone — a fourfold jump from July. [DeFlock’s tally](https://deflocktheusa.com/cancellations/) counts 149 cancellations, rejections or deactivations for January through August 2026 specifically. An Associated Press count cited by Stateline put the year’s total above 50. None of these is an official government figure; Flock disputes the framing entirely. A company spokesperson told reporters covering the wave that new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by roughly 10 to one this year. The company is nonetheless reportedly planning to cut about 18% of its staff, roughly 270 people — a detail that sits awkwardly next to a 10-to-one growth claim, whichever number is closer to true.

A federal judge in Oklahoma already found one warrantless Flock search unconstitutional this month, as [reported here](https://rews.cc/a/federal-judge-rules-flock-plates-search-was-unconstitutional-067653), and four separate bills now sit in state and federal legislatures aiming at different pieces of the network’s reach, as [reported here](https://rews.cc/a/four-bills-now-target-flock-s-license-plate-network-from-fou-546ae0). Murkerson’s suit tests a narrower, more specific claim than any of those: that a search can be unconstitutional not because of what the technology can see, but because of why a specific officer, with ordinary and otherwise lawful access, chose to look. No audit log distinguishes a well-founded hunch from a grudge. That distinction, if the courts require one, will have to come from somewhere other than the system logs Flock already keeps.