Virginia County Rips Out 122 Flock Cameras As Officers Nationwide Get Charged
In eight days, the largest Flock camera network in Virginia voted to tear itself out of the ground — and around the country, the officers who abused these cameras started getting charged faster than anyone can keep count.
HENRICO COUNTY, Va. — On October 6, the Henrico County Board of Supervisors voted to end the county’s contract with Flock Safety entirely. All 122 cameras come down. Henrico was the largest Flock user in Virginia — and its own numbers undercut the surveillance value proposition: those 122 cameras covered roughly 1.73 miles of roadway, about 0.05 percent of Henrico’s roads.
Board Chair Roscoe Cooper said residents raised “legitimate concerns,” and that while the county is confident its own police used the system properly, “we cannot ignore the potential for misuse of system data by others.” Ending the contract, he said, “is the right thing to do for our residents and community.”
Henrico wasn’t acting in a vacuum. The same week, the charges and firings stacked up:
In Kokomo, Indiana, Sergeant Jeffery Alan Bornes Jr. was arrested October 7 and charged with official misconduct and fraud. Court records say he ran 18 Flock searches on the same private vehicle between February 19 and 28 — a car connected to his ex-spouse — and entered “welfare check” as the justification every single time. How did anyone find out? Kokomo PD audited more than 9,000 officer searches in September. The audit caught him. Prosecutor Mark McCann put it flatly: “Officers are given access to do police work, not to look up people in their personal lives.”
In Athens, Georgia, Officer Tyler Vaughn was fired October 7 and now faces a GBI criminal investigation — after another officer discovered he had allegedly run repeated searches on his ex-girlfriend’s plate over a week in 2025 and reported him. Chief Jerry Saulters called the misuse “a serious violation of the trust placed in our officers.” The department’s response: Flock searches are now restricted to supervisors and above. And here’s the part that should concern every department buying these cameras — it was Athens’ second abuse case in six weeks. A civilian intelligence analyst supervisor in the same department, Nick Barker, had been fired in August for allegedly tracking his ex-wife’s plate for months.
In Virginia, the dominoes kept falling. Chesterfield County charged Rebekkah Robinson — a civilian police intelligence investigator — on October 2 after an internal probe found she’d abused the county’s plate-camera system and state databases. Days earlier, a former James City County officer was charged with Flock misuse. Two consecutive Virginia prosecutions in two weeks.
Now state legislators are moving. Virginia State Senator Mike Jones considered pushing a total ALPR ban — Governor Abigail Spanberger’s office called that “overly simplistic” — and is instead drafting two bills: one that decertifies any officer who abuses plate-reader systems, and one that requires a court warrant to pull camera data. Norfolk Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatahi, who opposes the warrant bill, defended the prosecutions this way: “The question is will they get caught and will they get prosecuted? And the answer is yes.”
The dominoes started before October, too. Arlington County voted September 15 to discontinue its Flock contract and ordered 41 cameras off public property within two weeks. Fairfax County has paused new installations pending a privacy review. Fairfax’s school board voted unanimously to keep the cameras off school property.
Here’s what the whole month proves, and it cuts both ways. The departments buying these networks always say trust us — it’s only used for legitimate police work. But what actually caught the abuse in Kokomo was an audit. What caught it in Athens was a fellow officer. Not a privacy board, not a warrant requirement, not Flock itself. The guardrails that work are the ones departments build after someone gets caught — and the cameras stay up until then. Henrico decided that trade wasn’t worth it. The rest of the country is about to make the same call, one budget season at a time.
OhDangReally is tracking every charge in this wave — Kokomo’s court docket, the GBI’s Athens findings, and Virginia’s decertification bill when it lands.
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