An Alpharetta, Georgia police officer ran 103 Flock Safety license plate searches over roughly three months to track a former romantic partner and a fellow officer whose vehicle kept appearing near hers, according to an internal investigation report obtained through a public records request. Patrolman Dustin Bozzo queried his ex's plate 56 times between March and May, the other officer's plate 29 times over the same window, and the ex's uncle's vehicle 18 additional times between April 5 and April 14 after she borrowed the car following an accident. Bozzo was placed on paid leave July 20 and resigned August 5.
Flock Safety operates one of the largest automatic license plate reader networks in the United States, with cameras deployed across thousands of jurisdictions and instant query access granted to line officers. The Alpharetta case is one of at least 45 documented incidents of US police officers using the system to look up current or former romantic partners. It is also one of the most detailed to reach the public record, because Sergeant Jabbar Braithwaite's full internal report survived a records request largely intact.
The relationship at the center of the case started in late 2025 between Bozzo and a then-fellow Alpharetta officer, now a civilian employee of the department. The affair violated the city's ban on workplace dating. Colleagues reported the two spending on-duty personal time together, prompting a written directive and a reassignment off the same patrol beat. A sergeant later reported spotting the pair meeting in a dark, secluded park at roughly 2:30 am while Bozzo was on duty.
Key facts
- 01Alpharetta patrolman Dustin Bozzo ran 56 Flock searches on his ex-partner and 29 on another officer between March and May.
- 02He also searched the ex's uncle's vehicle 18 times between April 5 and April 14 after learning she had borrowed the car.
- 03Bozzo was placed on paid leave July 20 and resigned August 5; a criminal investigation is ongoing in the department's CID.
- 04At least 45 incidents of US police officers misusing Flock to track current or former romantic partners have been documented.
- 05Flock audit logs show Bozzo tagged nearly every query as 'Wanted Person' or 'Traffic Infraction,' calling it 'just a quick keystroke.'
Bozzo, when first asked by Braithwaite whether he had ever been romantically involved with the other officer, responded, "At work?"
“To clarify the question, I asked whether, at any time, either while employed together or otherwise, he and [redacted] had engaged in a sexual relationship.”— Jabbar Braithwaite, Alpharetta Police Sergeant
The Flock searches for his ex's vehicle began in early March, around the time the relationship ended. Bozzo told investigators he was checking that she had arrived home safely at night. When he noticed a particular vehicle repeatedly appearing near hers in the Flock results, he began querying that plate too. It belonged to another Alpharetta officer who had recently transferred in from a neighboring department, a man Bozzo knew personally after they had both helped his ex move.
The Flock audit logs are what turned an internal HR matter into a surveillance case. The system prompts officers to categorize each query, and Bozzo almost always selected "Wanted Person" or "Traffic Infraction." He told Braithwaite the choice was "just a quick keystroke." Neither category was accurate. Neither the ex nor her friend was wanted for anything, and there was no traffic infraction under investigation. Every one of the 103 queries logged a false justification.
Braithwaite found no evidence undermining Bozzo's claim that he had not acted with malice or intent to harm. He concluded the misuse anyway.
Lieutenant Jason Hiott confirmed to WIRED that a criminal investigation is now underway inside the department's Criminal Investigations Division. Alpharetta police chief Trent Lindgren said the department holds itself to a "high standard" and took immediate action when the misuse was identified. Flock Safety did not respond to a request for comment. Bozzo also did not respond, and changed his Facebook profile picture and display name after being contacted.
Flock's product design puts the audit trail at the center of accountability — the category dropdown and the query log are the only mechanisms preventing officers from treating the ALPR network as a personal surveillance tool. The Alpharetta case shows how thin that mechanism is in practice. A patrolman can log 103 queries against three private citizens over roughly ten weeks, tag them all as active investigations, and face no automated flag. The misuse only surfaced when the department opened an unrelated internal review.
The pattern matters beyond one Georgia suburb. Flock's growth model depends on frictionless deployment: cameras go up quickly, officer access is broad by default, and audit review is retrospective rather than real-time. That trade-off is defensible when the alternative is slower solve rates on vehicle crimes. It becomes harder to defend as the documented count of stalking-adjacent misuse cases climbs into the mid-forties nationally, with each case requiring an internal investigation, a public records fight, and often a resignation before the facts become public. The commercial question for Flock is whether category-tag validation, anomaly detection on repeat plate queries, or mandatory supervisor sign-off on non-warrant searches gets built into the product before a state legislature or a court builds it in for them.
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