By Andy Rose, Graham Hurley, CNN

Atlanta (CNN) — When Alex Wittlin makes the 6-mile drive home every day from his workplace near Atlanta, 22 eyes follow him.

On May 3, something else was following him: police cars with their sirens on.

Spotting the lights less than a mile from his home, Wittlin turned onto a side street and pulled his gleaming red Pontiac Firebird over. Then the guns came out.

“Hands up!” an officer is heard yelling in body camera video Wittlin later obtained from the suburban Dunwoody Police Department. After following orders to walk backward and drop to his knees, he was placed in handcuffs and questioned by officers from Dunwoody and the neighboring community of Doraville.

“They asked me why was I beating my wife. I was like, ‘I don’t have a wife,’” Wittlin told CNN.

Wittlin, a 26-year-old broadcast television technician, watched quietly as two officers fist-bumped and another looked inside his wallet. At that point, the tense demeanor suddenly changed.

“It’s been a big misunderstanding,” the Doraville officer who saw his identification said.

Police actually had been looking for a different man who they said was accused of domestic violence in Doraville, was possibly armed with a gun, and was last seen driving a car similar to Wittlin’s. But it was Wittlin’s car – not the suspect’s – that was spotted on a Flock license-plate-reading camera, police would say in incident reports. More than 20 license plate readers were on his route, Wittlin said he discovered from a crowdsourcing website.

Wittlin was released after the Doraville officer confirmed Wittlin wasn’t the suspect, Doraville police told CNN.

Wittlin said he’d been aware Flock cameras existed, but that frightening afternoon made him realize just how much he was being watched.

“I don’t want to say it’s PTSD, but it definitely doesn’t make me feel happier about these cameras being around, seeing them everywhere I go,” Wittlin said.

Less than 20 miles from where Wittlin was stopped, another Atlanta-area resident is watching a growing backlash against that surveillance technology very closely. He is the CEO of Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that is the country’s most prominent maker of license plate readers and producer of the camera that spotted Wittlin’s car.

“I started Flock because I believe that every single person that lives in Atlanta deserves the right to be safe,” Garrett Langley told CNN in an interview last month.

But Langley’s affection for his hometown hasn’t kept his company from drawing, even in Atlanta, the kinds of criticism over issues of privacy, mistakes and misuse that have been simmering nationwide. In Flock’s home area, the business is being increasingly met by opposition expressed in town halls and city council meetings. And in September, the mayor of Atlanta announced plans for new regulations governing the city’s extensive camera networks – including Flock cameras.

“I have the same concerns as everyone, which is I want to be safe, and I want to have privacy,” Langley said. “I want both.”

Company started by college classmates

Automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, scan tag numbers and vehicle descriptions and put them in a searchable database that is frequently shared by police agencies. Users include not only law enforcement, but also homeowners associations and businesses – and advocates say the cameras can deter criminals and help track down suspects and missing people.

But concerns about mistaken identity, the right to privacy and misuse by police officers have exploded nationwide – including in metropolitan Atlanta, where Flock was created and still keeps its headquarters – in response to the cameras’ increasing use.

Flock Safety started after Langley was frustrated with car break-ins in his neighborhood, according to a profile from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 2009. He founded the company in 2017 with two other Georgia Tech alumni, using off-the-shelf parts and wireless tech to make a license plate reader that was less expensive than what was already on the market.

Langley says his connection to Atlanta is still critical.

“I live in Atlanta, right?” he told CNN. “I’m a citizen first and foremost. I’m a father second. And then I’m the CEO of Flock third.”

But the company’s hometown status hasn’t spared it from the current backlash, both political and physical, with automated license plate readers becoming targets for vandalism.

On a recent day at a crosswalk to the entrance of Georgia Tech’s midtown Atlanta campus, where Langley learned the skills that made Flock possible, students walking to class ignored some trashed electronics lying on the sidewalk.

A solar panel that had been cut from its perch on a utility pole lay on the ground, its glass smashed. Just above it, the powerless Flock camera it once powered still precariously hung on, despite one of the metal straps holding it up having been snapped in half.

Like many communities, Atlanta’s government doesn’t release the exact number of license plate readers it has or where they are. Although some agencies give more details through “transparency portals” operated by Flock, Atlanta does not participate in that service, and the city’s police did not respond to a question as to why it doesn’t.

But DeFlock, a crowdsourcing website that directs people to plot the cameras on a map after finding them, estimates the number in a 29-county area around Atlanta is more than 6,000 – both Flock and non-Flock ALPRs. Flock Safety declined to give a number for the Atlanta area, saying it is up to each of its clients to decide how much information about their Flock cameras they want to make public.

Flock says it operates more than 120,000 ALPRs across 49 states.

Atlanta leaders tighten rules

Public concerns about the technology got the attention of politicians in Flock’s hometown this year. Atlanta’s mayor recently asked city police to audit their ALPR searches – a process that flagged some possibly questionable uses that are currently under investigation.

The Atlanta police audit found only 0.07% of all their Flock searches from January to early September were questionable, Atlanta police said. But that still amounts to 79 inquiries now being double-checked for a possible violation of policy.

By September, Atlanta police revised their ALPR policy, including by clarifying circumstances when officers can search the Flock database, defining prohibited searches and potential criminal and administrative penalties for misuse, and mandating monthly compliance audits. A city council panel is now reviewing a citywide ALPR policy proposal, including restrictions on who can access the database.

“Technology that gives government extraordinary capabilities must come with extraordinary accountability,” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said in September while announcing the changes and proposals.

While Atlanta’s rule-tightening is welcomed by ALPR critics, many say it should have happened before thousands of eyes were already watching them.

“My parents grew up in mainland China, where surveillance technologies span every corner of the country, and citizens aren’t provided a say in their implementations,” Rachel Jiang, a student at Emory University, told the Atlanta City Council in September. “Growing up with this awareness has taught me the importance of laying down fundamental democratic safeguards around technology.”

In Dunwoody, just northeast of Atlanta, resident Stephen Upchurch is speaking out against the cameras, saying new regulations aren’t enough to protect privacy.

“In my opinion, the best course of action would be to cancel the contracts, remove the hardware that informs the software that’s so scary, and then we can all have a conversation about whether this type of thing is right for our communities,” Upchurch told CNN.

Critics have been literally flocking to speak publicly against the cameras, as city officials and police departments have held town halls in all of metro Atlanta’s four largest counties since August.

As the company navigates fierce critics and a wave of communities outside the Atlanta area ending their contracts, Flock has been tightening some standards on its own, nationwide.

Flock is reducing its standard data retention window from 30 days to seven, with the caveat that data can be retained longer if police attach it to a case number. The company by January 1 also will require users to accept new guardrails, including a requirement that police enter a case number to justify each search – though that function can be overridden in the case of emergencies.

Still, Flock’s co-founder says Flock is ready to accept more regulations like the city of Atlanta proposes.

“I think (Dickens) is taking a step in the right direction,” Langley said. “We need to have more accountability in the technology that police uses.”

While Flock Safety has become the most prominent provider of the technology – and the most prominent target of critics – Langley insists his company isn’t the problem, especially in a city heavily watched by cameras other than ALPRs. A 2024 analysis by the cyber security firm Comparitech said that among big US cities, Atlanta was the most surveilled per capita, with one camera accessible by law enforcement for roughly eight people. That counted not just ALPRs but standard surveillance cameras, body cameras and other devices.

“This isn’t about Flock,” Langley said. “This is about every piece of technology law enforcement uses in Atlanta, and I think that’s the exact right approach.”

Some officers are accused of illegally tracking citizens’ movements

Since 2021, there have been at least 85 cases in the United States – including 21 in Georgia – where law enforcement officers were accused of misusing an ALPR system to stalk people including former or current romantic interests, according to a database from the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm.

For example, a Milwaukee police officer resigned this year after he was accused of secretly using Flock to learn the location of his romantic partner 124 times and that partner’s ex 55 times, according to court records. He pleaded guilty to attempted misconduct in public office as part of a deal.

Stalking allegations are not the sole misuse cases that have arisen from ALPR systems. The Institute for Justice documents scores of cases in which officers are accused of misusing ALPRs in ways besides stalking, including officers giving search results to unauthorized people. Errors involving mistaken identity cases like Wittlin’s have also put Flock under fire.

Langley says he’s been disturbed by the misuse of his company’s services but believes it is not a problem confined to Flock cameras.

“Whether it’s legally criminal or clearly the intent is to do something unethical, it’s painful,” Langley said. “It’s one of the reasons why I’m proud of the tools we’re building, because I don’t believe if someone is using Flock, that’s the only thing they’re abusing.”

Flock says it is addressing data security issues through the new auditing and accountability controls it is implementing by the end of the year.

A citizen is watching the watchmen

While the Atlanta area has Flock defenders especially in law enforcement, communities near the company’s headquarters also have some of its most ardent and determined critics.

In Dunwoody, Jason Hunyar has been one of the most determined activists trying to find out how Flock cameras are being used in the city, filing a flurry of open records requests.

“I just had this super unnerving feeling and wanted to find out more about what was going on,” Hunyar told CNN about filing his first request last December.

By poring through logs, he determined that Flock employees with no law enforcement responsibilities had accessed some of the city’s cameras, including ones at the community center where his baby attended daycare that were tied into the city’s monitoring network.

Flock employees did so for testing and demonstration – including showing the system to another law enforcement agency – as allowed in an agreement with the city, according to a Flock email that Hunyar also found in the record searches, he said.

“If me and my wife and my 3-month-old son haven’t done anything wrong, we don’t need to be tracked and recorded by the government,” he said.

Texts that Hunyar saw through his records requests also indicated Langley had a private meeting with Dunwoody Mayor Lynn Deutsch this year, he said.

In an email, Deutsch told CNN the spring meeting “focused on access to Dunwoody cameras by executives for sales demos, which was stopped.”

“Since then, city leadership and police command staff have worked with Flock on additional guardrails,” Deutsch wrote. Deutsch declined CNN’s request for an interview regarding the city’s discussions and previous agreement with Flock.

A Flock spokesperson confirmed the company agreed to stop accessing the city’s data for its own promotional purposes, although Flock still features the community prominently on its website.

In response to the community center footage discovered by Hunyar, the company said: “Although the camera was only viewed during a routine demo, we understand that this is a sensitive location for many. We have therefore determined that employees will be trained to only conduct demos in more public locations, like retail parking lots.”

Police say the technology is helping deter crime

Although the Atlanta area is seeing an increasing hostility to license plate readers, it is also home to one of the technology’s most prominent success stories. In 2020, 1-year-old Mateo Mantufar-Barrera was abducted at gunpoint by kidnappers who jumped out of a passing vehicle near his home in Chamblee, a city about 15 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta. He was found later that same day near the Alabama state line, unharmed but dressed as a girl to obscure his appearance, after authorities tracked a vehicle matching a description given by Mateo’s mother.

“Luckily through license plate readers, they were able to stop those two very dangerous criminals and recovered this child who had been abducted from his mother while she was walking him in a stroller,” Chamblee Police Chief Michael Dieppa told CNN.

Chamblee has doubled down on surveillance technology, opening a Real Time Crime Center earlier this year to monitor cameras and share information. Officers access the database of license plate readers only when they are looking for something specific as part of an investigation, and supervisors regularly check those searches, the police chief said.

“Every single one of our Flock uses … has to be audited by a supervisor at the rank of lieutenant or higher every week,” Dieppa said.

But even with safeguards, abuse is possible, and Dieppa says his own department fired an officer accused of misusing the Flock system, along with other violations of policy, two years ago.

Dieppa says he hopes that the increasing stories of officers being disciplined or fired will build trust – that people will see police are taking privacy seriously.

“I think that’s going to rein in some of the misuse that’s out there,” he said. “Hopefully not too late so it doesn’t totally kill the public’s trust that we’ve tried to build.”

Some are skeptical about guardrails and whether cameras are effective

Though Flock is tightening some use standards on its own, for some civil rights advocates, the changes are too little, too late.

Recent Flock changes and guardrails are “retreads of easily circumventable security measures that had previously failed,” Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in testimony to Congress on September 23.

Marlow’s testimony also challenged the efficacy of Flock cameras and argued that the only situations that they have been studied and found to deter crime is in relation to car thefts and property crimes.

One of the most recent studies on the effectiveness of automated license plate readers, a working paper published in August by researchers at the University of South Carolina, found that communities they studied which deployed the cameras saw an 11% drop in auto theft but no significant change in other property crime.

“Research does not show that surveillance alone, cameras alone, deter the impulsive and emotionally charged behaviors behind violent crime,” said Thaddeus Johnson, a former Memphis law enforcement officer and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice.

The desire for tighter rules is starting to get bipartisan backing in Congress, where Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama asked the Justice Department to create its own nationwide guidelines on preventing police abuse of license plate readers, saying Americans aren’t satisfied with the current lack of federal guidance.

“Yes, they want to be safe from crime, but they also want to be safe from stalking and harassment,” Warnock told reporters in September. “They shouldn’t have to choose between one of the other.”

Flock’s CEO says he’s open to nationwide rules but thinks there may not be a single set of regulations that works around the country.

“I’ve thought a lot about this, and my guess is that it will wind up being a state-by-state regulation,” Langley said.

Currently under Georgia law, misusing license plate reader data is only an aggravated misdemeanor offense.

Even as they tighten regulations, Atlanta officials have made clear that wiping out Flock in its hometown is not part of their plans.

“Cameras, ALPRs, and other cutting-edge technologies have proven to be invaluable in the Atlanta Police Department’s efforts to prevent and solve crimes,” the Atlanta Police Foundation told CNN.

As conversations continue over how to reform the use of license plate readers, critics find that one of the most difficult things to do is get away from them entirely. After his own experience being tracked on Flock cameras, Wittlin said he used DeFlock, hoping he could cut down on the number of license plate readers he passes every day.

“There is a route with only one (Flock camera), but it would turn my 15-minute trip into a 30-or 40-minute trip,” he said.

As for a path that would let him avoid the electronic eyes altogether? He couldn’t find a single one.

The-CNN-Wire
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