Milton narrowed who can search its camera data. When?

Milton police run 36 license plate cameras made by Flock, a camera company. They photograph passing cars, and the photos stay searchable for a year. Three written answers from the police department, a week apart, show a change in who can search them.

Sept. 11. We asked whether Milton was in Flock’s national network and whether agencies outside Georgia could search its data. The department answered “Yes,” and wrote that authorized agencies outside Georgia “can access Milton-collected data depending on the City’s sharing settings.” We printed that Sept. 13. The department’s Sept. 11 answers on the cameras are posted in full on our camera map page.

Sept. 18. The department wrote that the city “has recently changed its sharing configuration.” Milton’s data, it wrote, “is now limited to law enforcement agencies within the State of Georgia,” about 800 of them. That is a privacy step for anyone who drives through Milton, and we have not found a city announcement of it.

The Sept. 11 answer did not say what the settings were that day. If it described them as they stood, the change came within a week. On Saturday we asked when it took effect and who made it.

Sept. 25. On Sept. 16 we had asked whether the city had signed an agreement about its cameras with HIDTA, a federal anti-drug program that coordinates federal, state and local police. (The letters stand for High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas.) The department said yes. Its agreement with HIDTA’s License Plate Reader Integration Project “establishes a framework for sharing selected license plate reader data with our federal and state partners for legitimate law enforcement purposes.”

The reason it gave: several of Milton’s cameras sit along state routes, and Georgia State Patrol policy requires the agreement before an agency can get permits for plate readers on state highways. The agreement “does not transfer ownership or control” of the city’s system or its data to HIDTA, the department wrote.

How that fits with the Sept. 18 answer, Georgia agencies only, is the open question. On Saturday we asked which federal agencies receive the selected data, what gets selected and since when, and who signed the agreement and on what date.

The two answers we promised. No Flock video: Milton’s Flock cameras “capture still images and associated vehicle information,” the department wrote, and the city does not currently operate “any Flock cameras that provide continuous recording or live-video feeds.”

More Flock cameras? Not in this budget. The police have asked Flock for proposals before, and the city has bought more standard plate cameras through agreements and purchase orders, the department wrote. More recently it reviewed Flock’s Safe City platform, which includes fixed video cameras and cameras that pan, tilt and zoom, and Flock sent a proposal. The department decided not to go ahead, and it requested no new Flock equipment in the budget for the year that starts Oct. 1.

The department’s side. It says search results are “investigative leads,” “not treated as conclusive identifications,” and that officers must verify them before acting. Milton’s own officers can search data from about 3,000 participating agencies and organizations across the United States, the department wrote Sept. 18. In 2024, it said, a partner agency’s cameras helped a Milton officer find the vehicle in a kidnapping case, which led police to the victim, who was rescued.

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