A spokesperson for the Savannah Police Department told WTOC that the department shares its Flock license plate camera access with other agencies, “but ICE is not one of them.” The same department has now fired an officer who, according to WTOC’s reporting, gave her Flock login to her husband. He is an ICE agent.
Both can be true. That’s the problem with a login.
What has been reported
According to WTOC’s Oct. 15 report, Savannah officer Amber Harpe was fired for sharing her Flock credentials with her husband, ICE agent Tyler Harpe. WTOC reported that he did not have a Flock account of his own through the Department of Homeland Security, and that most of the searches run under her login were for South Carolina plates. WTOC also reported that statements from the couple in city records say the searches targeted ICE subjects.
Several details come from officials rather than from the station. ICE confirmed to WTOC that it is investigating. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation declined to charge Amber Harpe. A City of Savannah spokesperson called the incident a breach of Savannah Police Department policy and public trust. WTOC also reported that Harpe canceled a scheduled termination hearing.
We have not obtained the termination records themselves. They belong to the city, and the Harpe-specific details above rest on WTOC’s description of them. Nobody has been convicted of anything here. Harpe was fired and not charged, and no video of the searches has been released.
What Savannah’s Flock page promises
Savannah PD runs a public Flock transparency portal. When we pulled it, it listed 74 cameras and 30-day data retention, and it reported 2,007 searches in the previous 30 days. The portal says “All system access requires a valid reason and is stored indefinitely.” It lists immigration enforcement as a prohibited use. It also lists a long roster of outside agencies with access, including several federal ones. ICE is not named among them.
The portal’s timestamp reads Oct. 23, 2025. It shows the rules on paper, not who actually used the system. It is a snapshot of the rules, and not a record of who used the system.
The login problem
Flock says every search is tied to a user and permanently logged. A log entry that reads “Amber Harpe searched this plate” is only as good as the assumption that Amber Harpe was the one typing. If someone with permission hands the credential to someone without it, the audit trail records the person with permission.
Flock said in an Aug. 13 post that multi-factor authentication is now mandatory for every login. That closes the door on a stranger who guesses a password. It says nothing about a user who opens the door herself. We covered the same gap in our look at a federal class action over police misuse, where optional security settings were the center of the complaint.
Savannah’s other Flock case
This is not Savannah’s first Flock problem this year. In August the city’s mayor placed six employees on leave over Flock camera use. The department asked the GBI to investigate on July 29 after an internal audit, and on Aug. 21 the GBI announced it had arrested four former Savannah police employees on charges of misusing the license plate reader system. The GBI’s release says preliminary information indicated they accessed Flock for non-law-enforcement purposes. It does not mention ICE or shared credentials, and Harpe is not among the four people it names.
Georgia has produced a steady run of these cases, including a 911 director who ran the system she was misusing and a Cherokee County deputy who kept two years of plate data.
What nobody has said yet
Nothing public explains whether any of the searches were tied to an ICE case, and ICE’s investigation is open. Nothing public explains why the GBI declined to bring charges. The public records we could find do not say what first flagged the searches.
The department’s position is that ICE does not have access. The record, as reported, is that an ICE agent’s searches ran under an officer’s login anyway. A password only shows that somebody knew it.
If a department can’t tell who was typing under an officer’s login, what is its audit log worth?
Top photo: A Flock Safety camera in Valdosta, Georgia, in November 2025. Photo: GA_Kevin, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)