Flock Safety and the police who use its automated license plate readers are facing yet another lawsuit over alleged misuse of the technology. This time, a Georgia man says Coweta County sheriff’s deputies ran his car through Flock’s nationwide camera network for months while he was suing the sheriff over a prior arrest.
Tyler Murkerson filed the proposed class action on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, naming Flock, Coweta County, Sheriff Lenn Wood, two sheriff’s office employees, and three unidentified operators as defendants, according to the complaint. Beyond his own claims, Murkerson is seeking to represent a broader group of people whose vehicles were searched on Flock by Georgia law enforcement without any recorded investigative reason.
“We believe this case is the first to allege actual retaliatory animus intended to punish someone for advocating for his own constitutional rights by using Flock cameras to illegally surveil him, invade his privacy, and harass him in clear violation of the law,” Christopher B. Hall, a co-founder and partner at Hall & Lampros, which represents Murkerson, said in a press release on Friday. The firm’s claim that this is the first such lawsuit has not been independently established.
Murkerson’s case adds to a growing pile of recent trouble for Flock and the law enforcement agencies that use it. Last week, a Colorado woman sued Flock and two towns after a Flock hit led an officer to hand her a summons for a $25 package theft she didn’t commit. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Oklahoma also threw out evidence from a warrantless license plate reader search. “This is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance,” U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill wrote.
It Started in a Gas Station Parking Lot
The Georgia dispute goes back to February 6th, 2023, when Coweta County deputies arrested Murkerson after a stop at a gas station by the Charlie B. Johnson Road intersection. “Tyler Murkerson filed a civil rights lawsuit against Coweta County sheriff’s deputies after they allegedly forced him to the ground, Tasered him, and arrested him in a gas station parking lot over a seatbelt law that doesn’t apply on private property,” the firm wrote on its case page.
Every charge was dismissed on June 26th, 2023, and on September 9th, 2024, Murkerson sued Wood and the two arresting deputies, Christopher James Teare and Radford Stark Brooks. That case was resolved and dismissed with prejudice in or around August, according to the new filing, which says the resolution didn’t cover the current claims. Teare and Brooks aren’t defendants this time.
While that previous suit was pending, the complaint alleges, deputies were searching Flock for Murkerson’s 2024 Toyota Camry. He says he only found out after the case ended, through HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a site that publishes Flock audit logs obtained via public records requests.
The audit record described in the complaint shows a 197-day surveillance period running from May 4th, 2025, through November 18th, 2025, with five searches attributed to the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office. Each query reached more than 6,000 agency camera networks nationwide. Only two of the five searches have been disclosed, and their operators are listed as “r.fau” and “w.fau,” which the suit says correspond to defendants Randall Faulkner and William Faulkner. Whoever ran the other three is sued as a John Doe.
The reasons typed in for the disclosed searches were “info” and “37.” Georgia law only allows plate data to be accessed for the investigation of an offense or activity initiated by a law enforcement agency, and misuse is a crime. “Neither corresponds to any investigation, case, incident, or call for service. A search recorded that way documents no investigation. It documents only that someone typed something,” the complaint argues. It also alleges that William Faulkner entered “37” for most of his searches and that only four of his thousands of queries included a case number.
During the same stretch of time, Murkerson also alleges he saw far more sheriff’s vehicles while driving home, with deputies parked within a quarter mile of his driveway on a dead-end road and in his business’s lot. The complaint adds:
“Mr. Murkerson told his wife he believed he was being followed and watched by the Coweta County Sheriff’s Office. She suggested he was imagining it. He came to doubt his own perception, worried that he was ‘going crazy,’ and gave up a six-year business relationship servicing a neighboring police department’s vehicles because he no longer believed he was safe doing that work. He was not imagining it. The audit trail proves it.”
Stricter Controls on Flock Searches Wanted
Murkerson wants damages and an order to purge unlawfully obtained records, pull vehicle identifiers from watch lists, and validate search justifications in Georgia. A judge hasn’t yet approved the case moving forward as a class action on behalf of those other drivers, and the allegations haven’t been proven in court.
The case against Flock centers on its free-text search reason field, which the complaint says accepted anything, including the “hehehe” Medford, Oregon, police previously used 20 times. In August, a Washington Post analysis found that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged with or accused of misusing license plate readers, with Flock’s system involved in 46 of those cases. Another case tracked by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and reported by 404 Media, indicated someone at the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff’s Department searched more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns with “LMAO” as the stated reason. Flock previously announced that case codes and its misuse detection tool would become mandatory by the end of the year, and it cut its default data retention from 30 days to seven. However, the complaint states, “Every one of those measures was available to Flock before Mr. Murkerson’s vehicle license plate was ever searched.”
As of Monday, neither Flock nor the Coweta County defendants appear to have publicly addressed the suit. In response to earlier misuse cases, Flock has said that every search is permanently logged and tied to an individual user, and that officers who abuse the system should be investigated and held accountable.
Flock did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for a comment. We will update this article if we hear back.
Coweta County Already Flagged Its Own Employees
Notably, in August, the sheriff’s office announced that a self-initiated audit of its Flock use had flagged several employee accounts. Three employees resigned in meetings with their department heads before the audit wrapped up or an internal investigation opened. The office asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to step in. Officials didn’t name the employees or describe what activity was flagged.
“We expect every employee with access to these systems to use them in a manner that is lawful, ethical and in accordance with agency policy,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement at the time. Atlanta News First reported that a wave of Georgia Flock misuse cases was likely driven by an AI audit assistance tool the company launched in April.
The complaint notes the audit announcement came the same month Murkerson’s first lawsuit ended, but it doesn’t identify who resigned. It suggests the three undisclosed searches of his car may have been withheld because they’re part of the GBI inquiry, or because they were run by or shared with an out-of-state agency not subject to Georgia’s open records law.
