Milton keeps your license plate data for a year. It used to be 30 days.

One lens, one solar panel, one pole. This is what a Flock license plate camera looks like; Milton runs 36 of them, the city says, and the map below has 55 inside the city line.

A year. That is how long Milton keeps the record of where your car has been. It used to be 30 days.

The police department told us so on Friday, in writing and on the record, along with thirteen other answers to the questions we sent Thursday morning. Thursday we told you we had asked. Here is what came back, and some of it the city had never said out loud.

The year. The department extended retention from 30 days to 365 “as part of a program upgrade to support investigations in which a lead may not emerge immediately.” Georgia law allows up to 30 months. Flock Safety, the vendor, went the other direction on August 13 and cut its default for new customers to seven days. Milton is inside the law and well past the vendor.

Two of the department’s own searches are under investigation. The department reviewed its search activity and “identified two matters that warranted further investigation as potential misuse. Both matters remain under investigation.” It had not announced them. It disclosed them in answer to our questions. Mayor Peyton Jamison said he could not comment on personnel investigations. His written statement, sent Saturday, does not mention them either; it is in the Roundtable below with the others.

Thirty-six cameras. Thirty-three on poles and three that move, the city says, plus license plate reading on 39 marked patrol cars. Then there are the 15 private cameras, at neighborhood gates and shopping centers, that police can search and whose owners cannot search back.

Who can look. Milton-certified officers and designated crime-intelligence staff, each on an individual account. “Not every search receives advance approval or individual supervisory review. All searches are logged.” Flock’s audit tool flags searches for a three-member department review team, and Milton is in Flock’s data-sharing program, so “authorized law enforcement agencies outside Georgia can access Milton-collected data depending on the City’s sharing settings.” Still true from 2022: nobody watches the cameras live, they take still pictures rather than video, and they are not used for moving violations.

Where they are. On Wednesday a resident asked Council to tell the public how many cameras there are and where. The city has now said how many. We drew the where.

Gold dots are inside Milton, hollow dots just outside the line: every camera pinned on the DeFlock map, from OpenStreetMap on September 12. That is 55 inside the line against the city’s 33 fixed units; the difference is homeowner associations, businesses and a school district that bought the same cameras, and the map cannot say who owns which pin. The mobile units and the patrol cars are not on it. One camera for every 750 residents, on the Census Bureau’s 2025 estimate. Tap any dot for what was recorded about it.

Two questions the answers walked around, and on Saturday morning we put both back to the department along with four more: when 30 days became a year, and who said yes. We also asked whether Milton will publish the vendor’s transparency page, which several Georgia departments do and Milton does not.

Sources: the Milton Police Department’s written answers to The Roundabout, September 11; Flock Safety, August 13; our map and its method.