Georgia · Bibb County · Crime & Courts

Bibb County Flock Camera Case: 3 Former Deputies Charged With Stalking and Violation of Oath

Flock notified the Bibb County Sheriff's Office of possible irregularities in how its license plate cameras were being searched. The internal audit that followed produced criminal charges against three deputies, all of whom have since resigned.

What happened in Bibb County?

Three former Bibb County Sheriff's Office deputies have been charged after an internal audit found they allegedly searched the office's Flock license plate reader system for personal reasons rather than for police work, WSB-TV reported.

According to WSB-TV, the internal audit — conducted with assistance from Flock — found that the three deputies accessed the camera system and used license plate data for personal, non-law-enforcement purposes involving people with whom each deputy had a personal relationship.

Investigators said the incidents were separate. This is not one scheme with three participants; it is three individual sets of allegations that an audit of the same system surfaced.

All three were arrested Monday, Aug. 10, and booked into the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center. 13WMAZ reported that all three have since been released on bond. Bond amounts and conditions were not available to The Local Alert at publication.

Who was charged, and with what?

The charge sheets are not identical. One of the three faces substantially more exposure than the other two.

Charges as reported by WSB-TV and 41NBC. The Local Alert has not reviewed the arrest warrants directly. The number of stalking counts against Lewis was not specified in the reporting reviewed for this story.

On employment status, WSB-TV reported that Stubbs and Lewis resigned as patrol deputies during the investigation, and that Callaway resigned as a K-9 deputy shortly after his arrest. 41NBC reports their ages as Coznavian Stubbs, 45; Joseph Callaway, 37; and Toni Lewis, 32.

How the alleged misuse was discovered

This is the detail that separates the Bibb County case from a routine personnel matter: the sheriff's office did not catch it on its own initiative. The vendor flagged it.

In his statement, Sheriff David Davis said: "Once notified by Flock of possible irregularities, our internal audit identified this alleged misuse of the Flock system, and once it was discovered, we acted."

In other words, the sequence ran vendor → agency → audit → charges. Flock saw something in the query records that did not look right, told Bibb County, and Bibb County's internal audit — assisted by Flock — turned that signal into a case.

What Sheriff David Davis said

Sheriff Davis framed the arrests around the trust placed in the technology itself:

"The public entrusts law enforcement with access to powerful technology and sensitive information, and with that trust comes an absolute responsibility to use those resources only for legitimate law enforcement purposes."

He also said: "No employee is above the law or the standards of this office." And, on what happens next: "We will continue to monitor and audit the use of this technology and take appropriate action whenever those standards are violated."

What is Flock Safety, and what do the cameras do?

Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based company that sells automated license plate reader — ALPR, or LPR — cameras along with the software agencies use to search what those cameras capture. It was founded in 2017 by three Georgia Tech alumni, Garrett Langley, Paige Todd and Matt Feury, and is headquartered in Atlanta, according to Wikipedia's entry on the company, which also reports it operated in more than 5,000 US communities as of 2025.

Mechanically, a Flock camera is a fixed, usually solar-powered unit mounted at a roadside or a neighborhood entrance. It photographs passing vehicles, reads the plate with computer vision, and records vehicle characteristics. Flock markets this as "vehicle fingerprint" data — make, model and color, plus distinguishing attributes such as bumper stickers, dents, mismatched panels and temporary tags.

Two things follow from that design, and both matter here:

• It is not targeted. The camera photographs every vehicle that passes, not only vehicles under suspicion. The database is a record of ordinary drivers.
• It is searchable after the fact. The value to an investigator is not the live alert. It is the ability to ask where a given plate has been.

That second property is exactly what makes the system useful for solving a car theft — and exactly what makes it dangerous in the hands of someone looking for a specific person.

What are Flock cameras used for in Georgia?

Two main functions. First, hot list matching: passing plates are compared against lists such as stolen vehicle reports and active alerts, and a match notifies nearby officers. Second, retrospective search: an investigator queries stored reads to reconstruct where a vehicle has been.

Georgia law does not enumerate approved investigation types. It draws a single line instead. Under O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22, captured license plate data "shall be stored immediately upon collection and not accessed except for a law enforcement purpose."

The statute defines that term narrowly: a "law enforcement purpose" means "the investigation of an offense or activity initiated by a law enforcement agency."

Read carefully, that definition does real work. It requires the agency to have initiated something. Curiosity is not an initiated investigation. Neither is a personal question about where somebody's car was last night.

Who can legally access license plate reader data in Georgia?

Three layers govern access, and they are frequently confused with one another.

1. The statute. § 35-1-22 permits law enforcement agencies to collect the data and to access it only for a law enforcement purpose. It also permits agencies to "exchange or share captured license plate data with other law enforcement agencies" for law enforcement purposes — which is how a search run in one jurisdiction can reach across data collected in another.

2. The vendor's contract terms. Flock's published LPR policy states that "LPR data gathered by the Flock Safety system on behalf of Flock Safety customers is owned by the customer," and that "customers choose whether to share LPR data with other customers in accordance with their laws and policies." The vendor hosts the data; the agency decides who else sees it.

3. The agency's own account list. This is the layer that failed in Bibb County. Statutory limits and sharing settings are irrelevant to an individual with a valid login who types in a plate. Which is why the number of people holding logins is itself a control — and why the sheriff is now cutting that number. See below.

The statute also directs that any agency deploying an ALPR system maintain policies for the system's use and operation, including policies for training officers in the use of captured license plate data consistent with the Code section.

How long does Georgia keep license plate reader data?

This is the single most misreported fact in Flock coverage, because there are two different clocks and headlines routinely cite the wrong one.

The 30-day figure is a vendor default that an agency can change. The 30-month figure is the legal ceiling. Georgia does not require a 30-day window; it merely forbids holding ordinary captured data past 30 months.

There is a second detail in the statute that matters for anyone hoping to inspect this system: § 35-1-22 provides that captured license plate data collected by a law enforcement agency is not subject to public disclosure under Georgia's Open Records provisions.

On penalties, the statute is narrower than many assume. Knowingly requesting, using or obtaining captured license plate data "under false pretenses or for any purpose other than for a law enforcement purpose" is a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature — not a felony. The statute also extends the same restrictions and penalties to contractors holding data on an agency's behalf.

What the audit trail records — and what changed in 2026

Every query is supposed to leave a record. Flock's policy says: "All queries of the LPR system are stored for auditing purposes, including: Username, Date, Time, Purpose of query, License plate and other elements used to query the system."

That log is the reason a case like this one exists at all. Without a per-query record tying a username to a specific plate and a stated purpose, an internal audit would have nothing to audit.

The log has also changed this year. WRDW reported on July 20, in a story by Brendan Keefe, that Flock removed officer names from audit logs where outside agencies search a department's data, replacing them with anonymized Flock ID numbers, and no longer includes license plate numbers in those logs. The company cited officer safety, and said full information remains available to authorized oversight bodies.

The same WRDW report described Flock developing an "audit assistance" tool using artificial intelligence to flag potentially suspicious searches. Attention: no source reviewed for this story states that the Bibb County referral came from that tool. What Sheriff Davis said is that Flock notified his office of possible irregularities. The mechanism behind that notification has not been described publicly.

What is violation of oath by a public officer in Georgia?

It is the most serious charge on all three sheets.

O.C.G.A. § 16-10-1 provides that any public officer who "willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law" shall, upon conviction, "be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years."

Two features are worth noting. The statute requires the violation be willful and intentional — a mistaken search is not the offense. Its punishment range — not less than one nor more than five years — is the longest of the charges filed. Georgia felony sentences may be probated or suspended.

Why does a database search produce a stalking charge?

Readers reasonably ask how looking something up on a computer becomes stalking. The answer is in the text of the Georgia statute, which is broader than the everyday meaning of the word.

O.C.G.A. § 16-5-90 provides that a person commits stalking when he or she "follows, places under surveillance, or contacts another person at or about a place or places without the consent of the other person for the purpose of harassing and intimidating the other person."

Three elements of that text do the heavy lifting:

• "Places under surveillance" is listed as an alternative to following. Physical pursuit is not required.
• The statute lists contact by "computer, computer network, or any other electronic device" among the means.
• The statute defines "harassing and intimidating" as a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes emotional distress by placing that person in reasonable fear for their safety or a family member's, establishes a pattern of harassing and intimidating behavior, and serves no legitimate purpose.

A first stalking conviction in Georgia is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in jail, a fine of up to $1,000, or both.

The Local Alert has not reviewed the arrest warrants in this case and does not know what conduct beyond the database searches, if any, prosecutors will present. The statutory text above is provided to explain what the charge means, not to characterize the evidence.

What is unauthorized disclosure of criminal history information?

Only Joseph Callaway faces this charge, and it points at a different database entirely — criminal history records, not plate reads.

O.C.G.A. § 35-3-38 makes it an offense to knowingly request or obtain criminal history record information under false pretenses, or to knowingly communicate it other than in accordance with the article. Conviction carries a fine of not more than $5,000, imprisonment for not more than two years, or both.

The presence of this charge on one sheet and not the others suggests the audit found a second system touched in that instance. What was allegedly looked up, and about whom, has not been made public.

Bibb County is cutting the number of deputies with Flock access

The most concrete policy consequence so far is a reduction in how many people can run a search at all.

41NBC reported on Aug. 11 that Sheriff Davis is cutting Flock access from more than 200 deputies to slightly more than 100, and wants to reduce it further.

Davis told the station the goal is to "make sure they're using the system as they should be and sending the message that we're not going to tolerate any type of deviation or illegal use of the system."

The underlying number is the story. An agency in which 200-plus employees could query a countywide movement database is an agency with 200-plus points of failure — and, per the statute, an obligation to train every one of them.

Where this fits in a wider Georgia pattern

Bibb County is not an isolated case, though it is a distinct one and should not be conflated with the others.

The July WRDW report described at least 19 to 20 cases in Georgia within the past year involving officers and LPR misuse, and reported on July 20 that the Richmond County Sheriff's Office had fired and arrested three more deputies. Those are separate matters from the Bibb County charges, involving different agencies and different people.

More broadly, Wikipedia's entry on Flock Safety cites a 2026 Institute for Justice review that identified 28 cases of US law enforcement officers abusing Flock and other ALPR systems to stalk former romantic partners.

The pattern across those cases is consistent, and it is not a technical failure. What failed was the assumption that a valid login equals a legitimate purpose.

How do I find out if my plate was searched?

There is no consumer-facing lookup. Realistically, there are two routes, and both have limits worth stating plainly.

• An Open Records Act request to the specific agency for audit logs referencing your plate or vehicle. Because the log is supposed to record username, date, time, purpose and the search terms used, that is where an improper query would appear.
• Contact the agency's internal affairs unit if you have a specific reason to believe you were targeted — particularly if the person you suspect works for that agency. The Bibb County case became a case because an audit was run.

Attention: two obstacles are documented. § 35-1-22 exempts the captured license plate data itself from public disclosure under Georgia's Open Records provisions. And per WRDW's July reporting, Flock has stopped including license plate numbers in audit logs, and anonymizes outside-agency officer names — changes that make an outside review meaningfully harder. Whether the audit logs are themselves a public record distinct from the captured data is a question The Local Alert is not aware of a Georgia appellate court having resolved.

What we don't know yet

This page will be updated as the Bibb County Sheriff's Office and the courts release more.

Charged, not convicted

Joseph Callaway, Coznavian Stubbs and Toni Lewis have been charged. None has been convicted of anything. All three have been released on bond, per 13WMAZ. They have not been tried, and no evidence has been tested in court.

Every allegation on this page is attributed to the agency that made it — principally the Bibb County Sheriff's Office, through Sheriff David Davis's public statement and the reporting of the outlets linked throughout. Each of the three is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.

Their resignations are an employment fact, not an admission. Resigning during or after an investigation carries no legal weight as evidence of guilt.

Frequently asked questions

Who was charged in the Bibb County Flock camera case?
Three former Bibb County Sheriff's Office deputies: Joseph Callaway, Coznavian Stubbs and Toni Lewis. WSB-TV reported all three were arrested August 10 and booked into the Bibb County Law Enforcement Center.

What charges does each former deputy face?
Joseph Callaway is charged with violation of oath by a public officer, unauthorized request or disclosure of criminal history record information, the prohibition on law enforcement retaining license plate data, and three counts of stalking. Coznavian Stubbs is charged with violation of oath by a public officer, the license plate data charge, and one count of stalking. Toni Lewis is charged with violation of oath by a public officer, the license plate data charge, and stalking.

How was the alleged misuse discovered?
Sheriff David Davis said Flock notified the sheriff's office first. In his statement he said: "Once notified by Flock of possible irregularities, our internal audit identified this alleged misuse of the Flock system, and once it was discovered, we acted." The internal audit was conducted with assistance from Flock.

What is Flock Safety?
Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based company that sells automated license plate reader cameras and the software agencies use to search the images those cameras capture. Its cameras photograph passing vehicles, read the plate, and record vehicle characteristics such as make, model and color.

What are Flock cameras used for in Georgia?
Agencies use them to compare passing vehicles against hot lists such as stolen vehicle reports and to search stored plate reads during investigations. Under Georgia law, captured license plate data may not be accessed except for a law enforcement purpose, which O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22 defines as the investigation of an offense or activity initiated by a law enforcement agency.

Who can access license plate reader data in Georgia?
O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22 says captured license plate data shall be stored immediately upon collection and not accessed except for a law enforcement purpose. Agencies may exchange or share the data with other law enforcement agencies for law enforcement purposes. Flock's own policy says the data is owned by the customer agency, and that customers choose whether to share it with other customers.

How long does Georgia keep license plate reader data?
Two different clocks apply. Georgia's statute sets an outer limit: data must be destroyed no later than 30 months after collection, unless it is the subject matter of a toll violation or is held for a law enforcement purpose. Flock's own published policy sets a much shorter default: LPR data is hard deleted on a rolling 30-day basis by default, which may be increased or decreased case by case.

Is misusing license plate reader data a felony in Georgia?
Not under the license plate statute itself. O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22 makes knowingly requesting, using or obtaining captured license plate data under false pretenses, or for any purpose other than a law enforcement purpose, a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature. The violation of oath charge carries the longest possible sentence of the charges filed.

What is violation of oath by a public officer in Georgia?
It is a felony under O.C.G.A. § 16-10-1. The statute says any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years. All three former deputies face this charge.

Why would a database search lead to a stalking charge?
Georgia's stalking statute, O.C.G.A. § 16-5-90, is not limited to physically following someone. It covers a person who follows, places under surveillance, or contacts another person at or about a place or places without that person's consent for the purpose of harassing and intimidating them, and it lists contact by computer, computer network, or any other electronic device. The Local Alert has not reviewed the arrest warrants and does not know which theory prosecutors will argue.

What is unauthorized disclosure of criminal history record information?
Georgia's criminal history statute, O.C.G.A. § 35-3-38, makes it an offense to knowingly request or obtain criminal history record information under false pretenses, or to knowingly communicate it except in accordance with the article. Conviction carries a fine of not more than $5,000, imprisonment for not more than two years, or both. Only Joseph Callaway faces this charge.

Were the deputies fired?
WSB-TV reported that Stubbs and Lewis resigned as patrol deputies during the investigation, and that Callaway resigned as a K-9 deputy shortly after his arrest. All three are described as former deputies.

Has the Bibb County Sheriff's Office changed anything since the arrests?
41NBC reported on August 11 that Sheriff David Davis is cutting the number of deputies with Flock access from more than 200 to slightly more than 100, with the goal of reducing it further.

How do I find out if my license plate was searched?
There is no self-service lookup. Every query is supposed to generate an audit record, and Flock's policy says stored query records include username, date, time, purpose of query, and the plate and other elements used to search. The practical route is an Open Records Act request to the specific agency for audit logs. Attention: O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22 exempts the captured license plate data itself from public disclosure, and WRDW reported in July that Flock has stopped including license plate numbers and outside-agency officer names in audit logs, which makes an outside review harder.

Are these three convicted of anything?
No. All three have been charged, and 13WMAZ reported they have been released on bond. They have not been tried. Anyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.