Six Savannah Police Employees Fired Over Flock Misuse, Four Arrested

Six is the number that matters in Savannah, and it landed all at once. Four sworn officers and two civilian employees, dismissed on the same day from the same department for the same reason: they used a license plate camera system the way police are not supposed to use it. ² That is not a policy disagreement or a training lapse. That is a department saying its own people turned an investigative database into a personal search engine, then calling in outside investigators to decide whether crimes were committed. ²⁵

The case began not with a public complaint but with what the Savannah Police Department called a proactive internal audit. On Aug. 3, 2026, the department announced the audit had identified "potential misuses of the department's Flock Safety License Plate Reader (LPR) system." ⁵ Six employees were placed on administrative leave pending "discipline up to and including termination," and the matter was referred outside the department for independent review. ⁵ The language was careful, but the structure was telling: leave now, referral now, decision later.

What the auditors found was broader than a single lookup. WJCL reported the probe flagged 34 suspicious Flock searches while the six employees remained on leave, their identities withheld because investigations were ongoing. ³ The Savannah Morning News reported the six are accused of conducting non-law-enforcement searches, "including looking up family members and personal acquaintances," a description that reframes the technology entirely. ¹¹ A license plate reader is sold as a tool for stolen cars, wanted vehicles and violent crime. Here, according to local reporting on the audit, it was allegedly used to check on people the searchers already knew.

The department also signaled it knew its controls had failed. The Savannah Morning News reported SPD will increase system audits from monthly to weekly. ¹¹ That shift, from a monthly look-back to a weekly one, is an admission about scale and speed: misuse can accumulate quickly inside a searchable location database, and a month is too long to wait to find it.

Four days after the leave announcements, the jobs ended. On Aug. 7, 2026, SPD terminated the six: four sworn officers and two civilian employees. ² The department said, "All six cases remain under independent criminal investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation." ² Termination closed the employment question. It did not close the legal one.

By Aug. 9, the story had gone national. ABC News aired coverage matching this account: "Six former Savannah Police Department employees are under criminal investigation after being fired for allegedly misusing the surveillance cameras by the company Flock." ¹⁰ At that point, no charges had been announced, only firings plus an active GBI inquiry.

Then the criminal case moved. On Aug. 21, 2026, the GBI arrested four former employees. ⁶⁹ Per the Savannah Morning News, those charged included Marquis Dillard, 48, of Savannah; Donald Phillips, 23, of Fleming; and Matthew Rich, 39, of Savannah, charged with two counts of misuse of a license plate reader (LPR) system and one count of violation of oath. ⁶ WJCL lists the same charges for Dillard. ⁸ WTOC reported the four were booked into the Chatham County Jail and that the GBI investigation is still underway, noting that all six had been fired two weeks earlier. ⁹

The charges matter because they are specific to the tool. Misuse of an LPR system is not a generic computer violation or a workplace rulebook citation; Georgia treats improper access to this kind of law-enforcement database as a criminal matter in its own right. The additional count described as violation of oath points to the other half of the allegation: that sworn personnel allegedly broke the public trust attached to the job, not only the access rules attached to the software. ⁶⁸ As of Aug. 24, the GBI investigation was still underway, meaning the four arrests may not be the final legal accounting for all six terminations. ⁹

The arrests also landed in a tense statewide moment for the technology. On Aug. 23, 2026, CBS Atlanta noted the arrests came days after a North Georgia sheriff offered a $1,000 reward about a vandalized Flock camera, and examined Georgia oversight of Flock use. ⁷ The juxtaposition is important. In one part of Georgia, a camera was physically attacked. In Savannah, cameras were allegedly misused quietly from inside the system. One is destruction of police equipment. The other is harder to detect and, for civil-liberties critics, harder to forgive: authorized users allegedly running unauthorized searches.

That inside-outside contrast explains why Savannah is now a statewide test case. The central question is no longer whether license readers can find a car. It is whether a police department can control who looks for what, log every query in a way that cannot be evaded, audit those logs often enough to matter, and punish violations severely enough to deter the next person tempted to look up a relative, neighbor or acquaintance. Savannah fired six people, moved from monthly to weekly audits, and brought in the GBI. ²¹¹ The fact that it still took an internal audit to surface 34 suspicious searches suggests the safeguards were retrospective rather than preventive. ³

There is also what this record does not resolve. The sources do not publicly detail every search behind the 34 flagged queries, nor do they establish motive beyond the characterization of personal lookups. ³¹¹ They do not say whether supervisors missed red flags, whether the system lacked technical blocks on non-case searches, or whether similar misuse had occurred earlier and gone unaudited under the old monthly schedule. Those are not peripheral details. They determine whether Savannah had six bad actors or a weak system that made misconduct easy.

For drivers, the implication is direct even without exaggeration. A license plate reader does not record what you say or where you go on foot, but it can place your car at a place and time, repeatedly, in a database that can be searched after the fact. When that search power is used for police work, departments defend it as essential. When it is allegedly used to check on family members and personal acquaintances, the same power looks like a location-tracking tool available to anyone with a login and curiosity. ¹¹ Savannah's answer — termination plus criminal referral — treats that distinction as the whole ballgame.