Amber Harpe, a Savannah Police Department officer assigned to the Behavioral Health Unit, gave her Flock Safety license plate reader credentials to her husband Tyler Harpe, a federal ICE agent. He used them to conduct 983 search entries across six states between January and July 2026, targeting individuals with active federal arrest warrants. The overwhelming majority of registered vehicle owners flagged in the audit were Hispanic. The access was not authorized. Tyler Harpe did not have his own Flock account through the Department of Homeland Security. Rather than request formal data-sharing through interagency channels — channels that exist under Georgia law — he simply logged in as his wife. For roughly four months, every search appeared in the audit trail under her name, not his, rendering the system's accountability architecture meaningless. Savannah PD does not participate in federal immigration enforcement. Maj. Michelle Halford wrote explicitly that the demographic pattern of the searches, combined with Tyler Harpe's ICE role, raised concerns that department resources had been conscripted into immigration operations without authorization. The system built to track missing behavioral health patients and local criminal activity had been quietly redirected toward a federal enforcement mission the department had chosen not to join. The internal disagreement over punishment reveals the institutional fault line. Interim Maj. Max Nowinsky recommended an eight-hour suspension, citing the absence of personal-gain motive and Harpe's clean record. Halford recommended termination, citing the scale — 983 entries, 97 plates, six states — and the deliberate circumvention of security protocols. Assistant Chief Robert Gavin sided with termination, noting that credential-sharing destroyed the audit trail's integrity regardless of the searcher's intent. Harpe's appeal argument is worth examining on its merits. She contended the outcome would have been identical had she personally run each search at her husband's request and relayed the results. This is technically true and structurally irrelevant. The entire point of individual credentialing is that it creates a chain of accountability. A system that cannot distinguish between its authorized users and unauthorized third parties is not a surveillance safeguard — it is a surveillance lending library. This case is one of several in a wider SPD Flock misuse investigation. Other fired employees allegedly used the system to search for romantic partners and personal contacts. The Harpe case stands apart because it involves systematic interagency mission creep rather than personal snooping — a federal enforcement apparatus borrowing local surveillance infrastructure through a marriage rather than a memorandum of understanding. The structural lesson is not about one couple's poor judgment. It is about the gap between how license plate reader systems are sold to communities — as local safety tools with robust audit controls — and how trivially those controls can be defeated. A single shared password converted a municipal policing tool into a six-state federal immigration dragnet. No technical barrier prevented it. Only a routine audit caught it, months after the fact.
