Fired Milton detective asks a judge to undo his firing

Randy Dula, the Milton police detective fired in August over searches he ran for his wife’s car on the city’s Flock license plate reader system, has asked Fulton County Superior Court to give him his job back.

His petition, filed Monday and assigned to Judge Thomas A. Cox Jr., asks the court to order him reinstated with back pay and benefits, or to send the case back to the city for a new hearing. Attached to it is the city’s final decision in his case, a record we asked the city for on Oct. 15 under Georgia’s open records law and have not yet received.

Why it matters: The city’s 36 license plate cameras, from the company Flock, record the cars that pass them, yours included, and officers can search those records by plate. The city’s written reasons for firing an officer over his searches are now in a public court file, and a judge has been asked to decide whether they hold up.

What the city decided. City Manager Steven Krokoff, the city’s top appointed official, denied Dula’s final appeal to the city on Sept. 28. He upheld the firing and the four findings a department review board had made against him: conduct unbecoming, neglect of duty, abuse of position and use of department equipment.

Dula has said he used the cameras to find his wife’s car because he feared she might be having a medical emergency. Krokoff wrote that Georgia’s plate-reader law allows the cameras only for investigations “initiated by a law enforcement agency,” and that he did not find Dula’s searches to be “activity initiated by the Milton Police Department.”

Krokoff wrote that Dula’s testimony about Jan. 24, 2026, undermined his claim that the searches were “an authorized response to a medical emergency.” The recorded searches “spanned approximately seven and a half hours,” he wrote, yet Dula did not ask for help from the police agency covering the area where he believed his wife was. Krokoff wrote that he did not treat the absence of a 911 call, “standing alone, as establishing misconduct.” But together with the repeated searches and the absence of agency involvement or documentation, he wrote, the missing call weighed against Dula’s “characterization of this activity as an authorized agency response to an emergency.”

He also wrote that Dula told the review board nothing it could say would change his belief that his actions were lawful, and quoted him: “There’s nothing I would have done different.” Krokoff wrote that those statements bore “directly” on whether anything short of firing would work. Citing “the seriousness and repeated nature of the conduct,” he ruled out counseling, training or a lighter penalty.

What Dula says. His lawyer, Robert L. Sirianni Jr., argues the city read the law too narrowly. A brief filed with the petition, his lawyer’s written argument, says Dula used the system “as a police officer” because he believed the person in the car might be having a medical emergency. It argues that “the duration and repetition of the searches do not transform that stated law-enforcement objective into a personal one,” and that the city “inferred an unauthorized personal purpose from the absence of formal agency procedures.”

The petition says Krokoff misapplied city and police policy, too, including the department’s plate-reader policy, which Dula was never charged with breaking. Among its other claims:

• He was not told in writing what he was accused of before he was questioned in the department’s internal investigation, as department policy requires.
• A witness with evidence in his favor was kept out of the review board’s hearing.
• The board held back its decision, took more information from the investigator and met again without Dula and without telling him.
• Firing him was harsher than the discipline the city has given other employees for comparable or more serious conduct.

Krokoff’s decision does not answer those points one by one. It says he considered Dula’s objections to “the investigation’s fairness and completeness” and found “no basis to conclude that the findings or disciplinary disposition resulted from predetermination, manipulation, or retaliation.”

What the dates show. The review board’s findings are dated July 29, the petition says. Dula was fired Aug. 7, according to city and state records. Police Chief Jason Griffin denied his first appeal Aug. 20, and Dula appealed to Krokoff on Aug. 24.

While that appeal was pending, the police department told us twice, on Sept. 11 and Sept. 18, that the two cases of possible camera misuse it had found in a review of search activity “remain under investigation.” On Sept. 18 it said that was why it could not give more details, and that it “will address any substantiated policy violations through the applicable administrative and disciplinary processes.” Neither answer mentioned the board’s findings or that an officer had been fired. The department has not told us whose cases they were. USA TODAY’s list of police flagged for unusual Flock searches includes Dula and one other Milton officer, who resigned in July while under investigation, according to state records.

On Oct. 2, four days after he denied Dula’s final appeal, Krokoff declined all 44 of our questions, including whether anyone involved in the two cases had left the department. His letter cited the staff time and legal review the questions required, and it called any private use of the cameras “unacceptable.”

The city’s answer. We asked Wednesday whether the city would fight the petition, why the department said in September that both cases remained under investigation and how it would answer Dula’s claims. The city’s statement: “The City does not comment on the substance of individual personnel matters or pending litigation. Because of that, the City has no comment on a court petition or on this matter generally.” Krokoff wrote us the same thing Oct. 22, after we had emailed the city questions following the Oct. 20 news conference.

Sirianni and Mitch Skandalakis, the lawyer who spoke for the Dulas at that news conference, did not answer our questions by Wednesday’s deadline. We will add any answer online.

What’s next. The petition asks the city to send the court the full record of the case, including recordings of the board hearing. The case turns partly on what Georgia’s plate-reader law allows. When we searched CourtListener, a public database of court opinions, on Oct. 2, we found no Georgia Supreme Court or Court of Appeals opinion citing that law since it took effect in 2018. The city says it expects to release records from our Oct. 15 request for the department’s internal investigation of Dula by Nov. 4.

Earlier: the lawyer’s account and what the search logs show (Oct. 20) and our first story on his firing (Oct. 15).

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