Alabama Lawmakers Draft Separate Bills to Cap Flock Plate Data

A Flock Safety camera logs a plate, a timestamp, and vehicle details every time a car passes. How long that record stays depends on the local contract. Alabama has no statewide floor. State Rep. Ron Bolton, a Republican from Northport and a former officer, told 1819 News he is drafting a 2027 bill to set stricter retention limits and criminal sanctions for misuse. “We’ve got to put some guardrails over those Flock cameras,” Bolton said. “They’re just like any other kind of technology. You just have to protect people’s rights.” He has not settled the retention window or the penalty. State Sen. Arthur Orr, a Republican from Decatur, has said he will file his own “very strict bill with warrants, audits, the whole works.” No text is public for either.

The cases are in St. Clair County. Moody Police Chief Reece Smith confirmed to ABC 33/40 that an officer was terminated on July 16 after an internal investigation found a violation of the department’s license-plate-reader policy. The findings went to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. Moody did not name the officer or describe the search. In Springville, Chief Jason Mize said an audit on June 23 found that searches on a single day involved a family member of an officer. The officer resigned on July 8, is no longer in law enforcement, and the family member was notified. Those findings also went to ALEA. Mize said all the unauthorized searches occurred on one day.

Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones has defended the cameras for investigations and said, according to WSFA, that the data should protect the public and not be used for unrelated purposes. Trisha Mellberg Cater, executive director of the Alabama District Attorneys Association, has described the issue as likely to be prominent when the session opens. Prosecutors want protocols that stop misuse without removing a tool they cite in missing-child cases.

Flock’s published policy sets a seven-day default hard delete, down from 30 days before August 2026. Agencies can lengthen or shorten that under contract or statute. Existing customers keep their current windows. Evidence Mode lets detectives park specific hits in cold storage past the default. Case codes are required for law-enforcement searches by the end of the year, with emergency bypasses flagged for review. Every search is supposed to log username, date, time, stated purpose, and the plate queried. Those are company controls. They are not a statute, and they do not bind an agency that already signed a longer retention deal.

Orr has said non-emergency searches should require a warrant. He has favored a retention period of a year or less, against Alabama’s existing five-year maximum, and has questioned whether a misdemeanor is enough when an officer runs plates for personal reasons. Bolton’s bill is aimed at a shorter window and criminal liability. The two approaches are not the same. A one-year cap still leaves a year’s worth of every passing car on a server. A seven-day statutory floor would cut that. Neither number is in a filed bill.

The cameras will still sit on the roadside while the drafts are written. What changes if either bill passes is the legal status of the record: how long it must be deleted, whether a non-emergency search needs a warrant, and whether an officer who searches a relative’s plate faces a criminal charge or an internal memo. Until the text is filed, the only statewide rule is the one the vendor and the local contract already set.