Two Baldwin County Deputies Charged In Flock Plate Data Case — One Trained The Others

Two deputies, one camera system, and a complaint that ended careers in three days

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia has charged two of its own deputies with misusing its automatic license plate camera system — pulling plate data with no law enforcement reason behind it, according to charging allegations.

One of them is the deputy who was supposed to be teaching everyone else the rules.

Kevin Steinmeyer spent roughly twenty five years with the department, rising to training officer — the deputy responsible for showing new hires how the job is done. Prosecutors allege his misuse of the plate-reader system came in June 2026.

Daniel Peavey worked road patrol. His alleged offense dates to February 2026 — and by the time anyone caught on, he had already left Baldwin County for a new badge at the Twiggs County Sheriff’s Office.

The three-day collapse

According to the department, a complaint arrived October 6. Two days later, both men were fired. One day after that, both were booked.

Twiggs County was notified about Peavey on a Thursday — and terminated him the same day. But the episode leaves an uncomfortable question on the table: how does an deputy under a plate-data investigation pick up a job at a second agency before the case breaks?

The charges

Both men face the same two counts: violation of oath by a public officer — a felony under Georgia law — and knowingly requesting or obtaining license plate reader data for a non-law-enforcement purpose, a violation of Georgia’s ALPR data statute.

Sheriff Bill Massee put out a statement after the arrests: “We are extremely sorry that it happened. We’ve been constantly reviewing our Flock systems here to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Sorry is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The system was allegedly misused twice — six months apart, by two different deputies — before a complaint stopped it.

The questions nobody has answered

Whose plates did these two men look up? How many times? Was the complaint an outside tip or an internal audit? None of that is public yet. The charging documents have not been released.

What is public is the pattern. Georgia has now seen multiple camera-misuse cases in recent years — a state prison intelligence analyst charged for running searches, Hall County’s own scandal, and now Baldwin County. Nationally, some agencies have started ripping the cameras out entirely; one Virginia county recently dropped its whole contract.

The cameras aren’t going anywhere. Thousands of them watch American roads, logging every plate that passes. The only thing between a plate scan and a nosy deputy is an audit log nobody reads — until, sometimes, somebody reads it.

What happens next

Both men are out pending their initial court proceedings. Violation of oath carries real prison exposure in Georgia. Watch this space — the docket will answer the questions the sheriff’s office wouldn’t.

Covered as charged allegations; both men are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.