Savannah Officer Fired for Sharing Flock Login With ICE Agent Husband

Former Savannah police officer Amber Harpe was fired in August after an internal investigation found she shared her Flock login with her husband, ICE agent Tyler Harpe, according to reporting published Oct. 18. The Verge

Flock is the camera network and search tool police use to look up license plates. The Savannah Police Department does not share its Flock data with ICE. The department said Harpe broke its security rules by sharing access.

Investigators counted 983 searches on 97 plates run by Tyler Harpe through that login. The plates were overwhelmingly registered to Hispanic drivers. Tyler Harpe did not have his own Flock account, so Amber Harpe gave him her username and password. Gizmodo

Tyler Harpe said "every name he ran in Flock was an ICE target." WABI Amber Harpe and Tyler Harpe said the searches were "strictly for law-enforcement purposes and not for personal reasons."

Department leaders disagreed on the penalty. Interim Major Max Nowinsky recommended an eight-hour suspension for Amber Harpe. Major Michelle Halford and Assistant Police Chief Robert Gavin rejected that advice and fired her.

Harpe was not the only one to leave. Five other SPD employees were also fired after the investigation found Flock misuse. Four of the fired employees were later arrested. Amber Harpe was not among those arrested.

The broader context here is identity control in police databases. When two people use one username and password, the log still records how many searches were made but it cannot show reliably who made them. Giving each user their own account exists to avoid that confusion and to enforce rules about which agency can see what.

Looking at what this means for other operators of similar systems, the friction point is access without a formal sharing agreement. SPD policy said no Flock data to ICE. An ICE account would have been refused under that rule. A borrowed SPD login got around the rule without changing it. When security depends only on passwords and people following the rules, misuse is usually caught only later, through reviews of search patterns and internal reports.

In my view, the split over punishment is worth flagging for anyone writing rules on password use. An eight-hour suspension treats sharing a login as a paperwork mistake. Firing treats it as a loss of trust. SPD chose the second view, even though the stated reason was police work rather than personal snooping. Other agencies will likely use that choice when they set penalties, training, and technical limits on shared logins and cross-agency searches.