Santonio Wilcher, 37, of Lyons, a former sergeant with the Vidalia, Georgia, Police Department, was booked into the Toombs County Jail on two counts of misuse of a license plate reader system and one count of violation of oath of office, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in an Oct. 19 release. Those are charges, not findings. Wilcher has not been convicted, and the release carries no statement from him or an attorney.
The case started inside Vidalia PD. After an internal audit of the department’s Flock Safety system, Vidalia police asked the GBI on Oct. 14 to investigate, and the bureau’s release followed five days later. GBI’s preliminary information is that Wilcher accessed the system multiple times for purposes that were not law enforcement. The release does not say which searches the audit flagged, whose vehicles were looked up, or over what period. When the investigation is finished, the file goes to the Middle Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office, which decides what gets filed. No court date is listed.
What Georgia law says about a plate-reader search
Georgia’s plate-reader statute, O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22, lets police store captured plate data and look at it only for a law enforcement purpose. Anyone who knowingly requests, uses or obtains the data under false pretenses, or for any other purpose, commits a misdemeanor “of a high and aggravated nature,” and each offense counts separately. The GBI release does not cite a code section, so which subsection the two counts rest on is not public yet.
A high-and-aggravated misdemeanor is the top tier of misdemeanors in Georgia: up to 12 months in county custody and a fine of up to $5,000 per offense. That tier matters for the third charge. Georgia’s violation-of-oath statute is a felony carrying one to five years, and it applies only when the violation involves a felony or a high-and-aggravated misdemeanor. The release does not say what the oath count is built on, but a plate-reader misdemeanor is the kind of offense that statute reaches.
Who checks the logs
The same statute puts the data outside the state’s open records law. A driver, a reporter or a lawyer cannot request a department’s search history and read it. Captured data can be kept up to 30 months. Whether anyone reads the audit trail therefore depends on the agency that runs the cameras, and in Wilcher’s case Vidalia PD read it and referred what it found to outside investigators.
The GBI has done this repeatedly. Since July 23 it has issued at least eight other arrest releases for plate-reader misuse, among them a Conyers Police Department employee, a former Paulding County 911 director, a Clayton County deputy and a former Hall County investigator. The Auto Wire has followed the same trend through the Conyers supervisor case, five Albany officers charged, six Savannah employees benched, a fourth Cherokee County firing and our running record of reported misuse.
Vidalia is the audit working. The department read its own logs, didn’t like what it saw and called the GBI. What an audit cannot show is what nobody looked at. A department that never reads its logs produces no referrals, and under § 35-1-22 nobody outside it can ask to see them. The offboarding gap we reported last week is a related blind spot, where a former employee’s account stays live.
The next thing to watch is the Middle Judicial Circuit DA’s decision on whether to bring the two misuse counts and the oath count. Anyone with information on the case can reach the GBI’s Eastman office at 478-374-6988 or the statewide tip line at 1-800-597-TIPS.
Your town’s cameras have a search log somebody is supposed to read. Who should that be, and how would you ever know they did?