The Flock ecosystem relies on a specific promise: that local ‘internal affairs’ and audit logs are sufficient to prevent abuse. Recent criminal charges against two Georgia law enforcement officers—a Police Chief and a Sheriff’s Deputy—suggest that this promise is hollow. Now, Flock is moving to ensure those cases will be harder to detect.
First, to temper expectations: an after-the-fact justification is much easier than identifying and validating findings regarding ongoing misconduct. These incidents demonstrate that the tools here could be useful in some way, not that they are fool-proof. Second, to my knowledge, neither Braselton’s Chief nor the Echols County Deputy have been convicted of any crime. So far, wrongdoing has been alleged, not proven.
With that out of the way, let’s examine the stories and the recently-added operator insights pages.
Braselton’s Chief of Police
On Wednesday evening, Braselton Police Chief Michael Steffman announced he was retiring and resigned from the department for personal reasons. He was booked and charged, accused of using police cameras to stalk and harass people.
…
[Flock’s Josh] Thomas says Flock handed over a log that is built into the system that allows them to see how, when and why the tech was used.
As a sidenote: this is an interesting play from Flock—inserting themselves into the narrative rather than relying on the “local oversight” they typically claim is effective.
Opening Braselton’s operator list, it is not immediately evident that the arrested person was Michael Steffman. Another officer’s behavior raises more red flags in the system. You will have to draw your own conclusions based on the information available.
Anyway, Steffman’s Insights Page shows multiple red flags on the first page:
- Days Active: 101
- Total Searches: 2,707
- Unique Plates: 42
- Unique Reasons: 4
- Account Sharing Candidate (Temporal entropy 2.710)[1]
This already looks like someone looking up the same plates over and over at all hours of the day without providing a valid reason.
But, who knows, maybe Braselton was conducting long-term surveillance for operation “005”[2] and the Chief personally saw to it that any movement was logged, 24/7.
As a reminder: the “Target” column uses identifiers which represent license plates.
We don’t have to get into the complexity of SAI: looking up the same license plate 411 times should be a red flag.[3]
Zooming in, we can see that we have records of searches for this plate, by Steffman, spanning October 2024 – August 2025; those dates more likely indicate the end of the records period on haveibeenflocked.com than the end of the searches.
20% of those searches were flagged as made outside of what the system flagged as typical hours for Steffman (12pm – 12am).
Looking at the isolated sessions, Steffman did further lookups in between extended periods of non-use; suggesting he was not on-shift at the time.
What makes this case exceptionally unusual, besides how rare arrests for these cases are, is that Steffman’s employee record, which is also listed on the page, indicates that he spent the last twenty years in Braselton.
In the world of policing, a twenty-year veteran and Chief is usually afforded every benefit of the doubt. Not in this case, in Flock’s home state.
For a department to bypass internal discipline and move straight to handcuffs and a media circus suggests toxic politics, at best. Especially when considering the red flags for other users in the department.
Echols County Deputy
This one is more straightforward. Echols County’s page shows “A. Ant” and “A.” without overlapping time periods, suggesting that some time in June or July, Anna Altobello shortened her name in the system. This appears to be a departmental policy that tracks Flock’s desire to obfuscate.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Anna Altobello, 33, misused Flock Safety accounts belonging to the Echols County Sheriff’s Office to search for tag information on people she knew personally, outside of law enforcement purposes.
The GBI said it happened multiple times and Echols County Sheriff Randy Courson asked the state agency to investigate in December.
Looking at “A.”'s Operator Insights page reveals a similar pattern as Steffman’s:
- Days Active: 91
- Total Searches: 691
- Unique Plates: 36
- Unique Reasons: 3
- Account Sharing Candidate (Temporal entropy: 2.794)
Her favorite reason to use is “Case”.
The Surveillance Target List looks eerily similar too, with the location history for one plate being pulled 205 times over 124 days.
The data on the insights page, even at a glance, is suggestive of improper use.
The Null Hypothesis: A System Feature?
When analyzing this much data, one must consider the Null Hypothesis: that these patterns are not evidence of stalking, but “noise” or software artifacts.
Perhaps “Temporal Entropy” indicates a disorganized shift schedule, or maybe “411 searches of one plate” is how a specific investigative workflow functions.
However, the nature of the data makes that difficult to accept.
Hundreds of searches for vague reasons is by its nature suspicious. While it’s conceivable that a few officers would be tracking someone 24/7 for legitimate investigative purposes, logic dictates that police work in shifts more than the data suggests.
Is 400 searches for a single plate for the reason “sus” hard evidence of anything? No. Should it be investigated? Yes.
Flock’s Fix
In addition to analytical tools and blog posts, this website also exists to give stalking victims a way to discover they’re being targeted: if you enter your license plate on the main page and your ex’s name comes up 411 times for “inv”, odds are you are a victim of criminal stalking.
So what does Flock do in response?
It has removed names and license plates from network audit logs.
By redacting this information, Flock is making it impossible for external auditors, including other police departments and stalking victims, to flag suspicious behavior.
That, the company argues, would jeopardize “officer safety.”
The number (between 0 and 3.18) indicates “around the clock” activity. The higher the number, the more usage is spread out over the day rather than concentrated in certain hours (e.g. daytime) Read more here. ↩︎
Maybe 005 was his badge number? We can only guess. The reason was “005.” ↩︎
The numbers, however, may be somewhat skewed because of redactions. ↩︎