A former Savannah police officer was fired after she provided her husband, a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, with unauthorized access to the Savannah Police Department’s (SPD) Flock license plate reader system. According to internal documents, the officer, Amber Harpe, shared her username and password with her husband because he did not have his own Flock account through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Her husband used these credentials to conduct hundreds of searches tied to ICE investigations, including nearly 1,000 searches across six states between January and July 2026.
The Flock system is a surveillance tool that allows law enforcement to track and identify vehicles using license plate data. While the investigation found that the searches were conducted for law enforcement purposes—specifically to locate ICE targets with active arrest warrants—the SPD determined that Harpe’s actions violated department policy. The department emphasized that credentials are assigned to specific authorized users to maintain audit integrity and system security. Because the searches were performed under Harpe’s account, the system's audit trail identified her as the user, effectively bypassing the safeguards designed to monitor and oversee the use of sensitive law enforcement data.
This image relates to the investigation into the unauthorized sharing of Flock system credentials.
The incident highlighted a significant gap in how municipal and federal agencies coordinate data access. Although Georgia law permits the exchange of license plate data between agencies for legitimate purposes, the SPD ruled that this does not authorize an officer to share personal login credentials. The department noted that this arrangement exposed the city to legal and reputational risks, particularly as the audit identified a demographic pattern in the searches that raised concerns about unauthorized immigration enforcement. Harpe appealed the termination, arguing that her actions were intended to assist another agency, but the police chief’s office upheld the firing, citing the intentional sharing of credentials and the scale of the unauthorized activity.