The Milledgeville Police Department is down a detective, as Maj. Brandon Sellers was fired following an arrest last week, Chief Dray Swicord confirmed to The Baldwin Bulletin.
Sellers, 48, had led the MPD’s criminal investigations division for the past two years. The MPD hasn’t named an interim replacement for Sellers, and Swicord said, “it’s currently a team effort.”
Sellers was charged with one count of violation of oath by a public officer and one count of misuse of captured license plate data.
The first is a felony and the latter a misdemeanor.
Despite being a felony, prison time is very rare in the case of violation of oath convictions. Currently, only three people in Georgia are serving prison time for the charge, according to the Department of Corrections’ database.
Sellers was the latest Georgia law enforcement officer to get caught up in using the Flock license plate reader camera database for personal reasons. The Flock database allows law enforcement officers to track people’s vehicle and commuting patterns.
It’s not immediately clear exactly what Sellers did, as the incident report was brief, and there was no supplemental incident report. What is known, however, is that another “employee of the Milledgeville Police Department” first became concerned and went to Swicord with those concerns. An inquiry began, and that inquiry led to Sellers’ arrest.
“We will not tolerate the misuse of Flock technology in any manner,” said Swicord.
Approximately 20 Georgia law enforcement officers have been arrested in the last month-and-a-half and accused of misusing the Flock database.
Milledgeville/Baldwin County currently is home to around 30 Flock cameras. Included in this number are the Flock cameras used to catch speeders in school safety zones.
The wave of Flockrelated law enforcement arrests has ignited a wave of backlash against the camera system. Some citizens are more passionate about the issue than others, as cases of sawing off, breaking off, or damaging Flock cameras have been reported across the country this summer.
Someone in Taylor County sawed off a Flock camera and stole it before it ever became operational, while in Barrow County three Flock cameras recently were destroyed.