Three Cherokee Deputies, One Surveillance System, and a Lot of Unanswered Questions

2 days ago
7 min read

From left to right: Chris Bryant, Cynthia Jodesty, Mike Creeden

The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office did the right thing when it audited its own license plate reader system. Most agencies never look, and the ones that do rarely make the results public. Sheriff Frank Reynolds and his Real-Time Intelligence Division deserve credit for running self-initiated audits and acting on what they found.

The audit is a first step, and the public deserves the full story. Three sworn deputies have now been arrested in two weeks for using a powerful surveillance tool against the very people it is supposed to protect. That is a serious failure of trust, and the public deserves a full accounting of what happened.

What we know

On June 12, Deputy Cynthia Jodesty was arrested and fired after an audit showed she had run the license tag of another sheriff's office employee through the agency's Automated License Plate Reader system. The search served no law enforcement purpose. On June 22, investigators arrested two more: Lt. Chris Bryant, 45, of Acworth, and Sgt. Mike Creeden, 35, of Cartersville. Both were fired. All three face one felony count of violation of oath of office and one misdemeanor count tied to the unlawful retention of license plate data. Each was booked into the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center on a $3,812 bond.

The sheriff's office says a detailed investigation determined that three authorized users ran the system for non law enforcement purposes, in violation of both agency policy and Georgia law. Beyond Jodesty's co-worker search, officials have not said why these deputies looked up the plates they looked up, or whose plates they were.

The community should keep pressing for those answers.

Why the details matter

This is a breach of the public's trust with real consequences. Under Georgia law, the license plate system collects the GPS coordinates, date, time, photograph, and tag number of every vehicle that passes its cameras. In plain terms, it is a record of where people drive and when. When a deputy abuses that access, the harm lands on a real person. These systems have a documented history of being misused for personal ends: officers looking up co-workers, neighbors, former partners, or people they hold a grudge against. The Jodesty case, a deputy running a colleague's plate for no official reason, fits that pattern exactly.

So the questions Cherokee County residents should be asking, and that local reporters and commissioners should be pressing, include:

Whose license plates were searched, and were any of those people notified that they were surveilled by a deputy with no case file behind it?
How far back do these audits go? The three arrests came from one round of self-initiated audits. What about the years before the Real-Time Intelligence Division started looking?
Were any of the improper searches connected to immigration enforcement, domestic disputes, or political or personal targeting?
What policy changes, training, and ongoing audit schedule will the sheriff's office put in place to catch misuse in real time?
Will the audit findings be released publicly, or only the arrests?

There is a structural catch that makes public oversight harder. Georgia's license plate statute, O.C.G.A. 35-1-22, specifically exempts captured license plate data from the Open Records Act. The very records that would let the public verify how the system is used are sealed from open records requests. That puts the burden of transparency squarely on the agency itself, because almost no one else can force the question.

The system behind the arrests

The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office runs Flock Safety cameras, the Atlanta based license plate reader company that now operates more than 100,000 cameras across the country. In 2023, the sheriff's office received a state grant of roughly $518,000 to buy 35 Flock cameras and cover five years of maintenance. The cameras scan and log essentially every plate that passes, whether or not it is connected to a crime.

Georgia law sets the guardrails: captured plate data may be stored and accessed only for law enforcement purposes and must be destroyed within 30 months. Knowingly using that data for any other purpose is a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature under the statute. That misuse is the misdemeanor these three deputies are charged with, alongside a felony count of violating their oath of office. The statute is clear. What Cherokee County just tested, in the worst way, is whether the people with access actually follow it.

This is bigger than Cherokee County

Cherokee is a local example of a problem surfacing across metro Atlanta and the country as more agencies audit their systems.

In March 2026, reporting showed that the Atlanta Police Department had run at least 15 license plate searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the prior year, despite the department's public denials of cooperating with ICE. In a separate national review of Flock audit logs, the Franklin County Sheriff's Office here in Georgia appeared among the agencies running searches tied to immigration enforcement against another city's camera network.

The pattern goes well beyond Georgia. Since the start of 2026, more than 30 cities nationwide have canceled, suspended, or declined to renew their Flock contracts after audits revealed that data residents thought was staying local was being queried by federal agencies, including ICE, the ATF, and others the cities had never authorized. A June 2026 audit in San Francisco found its camera network had been improperly searched roughly 300 times by out of state and federal agencies. An earlier records release showed out of state agencies ran more than a million searches against San Francisco's data, some explicitly labeled as ICE related.

The thread connecting all of it is the same: these systems collect enormous amounts of data on ordinary people, the access controls are weaker than the public assumes, and the abuse surfaces only when someone audits the logs. For immigrant families across North Georgia, already living under intense enforcement pressure, a poorly governed surveillance network is a direct and immediate risk.

And now, Woodstock's turn

This is why a line item on the June 22 Woodstock City Council agenda deserves the community's attention. Under Old Business, the agenda included a request from Police Chief Roland Castro to purchase the cloud based Samsara platform for 40 police vehicles. The order form spells out exactly what that means: 40 Vehicle IoT Gateways that plug into each patrol car and stream real time GPS location and vehicle telematics, paired with 40 dual facing dash cameras that record both the road ahead and the inside of the cruiser, all uploaded to Samsara's cloud. The quote lists a total contract value of $94,071.60 over a 36 month term, with recurring software licenses of roughly $31,200 a year after the first invoice.

A few details are worth knowing. The purchase runs through a Sourcewell cooperative purchasing contract, which lets the city buy off an existing national agreement rather than put the contract out for a separate competitive bid. The licenses include API access for integration with third party systems, and the whole order is governed by Samsara's public sector terms of service and its data protection addendum. The order form even asks the city, a public body, to keep its pricing and payment terms confidential, a clause that sits awkwardly against Georgia's open government norms, even though the document is now public in the council's own agenda packet.

Samsara is a fleet telematics and in car camera system built to monitor a department's own vehicles and officers. Its gateways log each cruiser's location and driving behavior, and its dual cameras face both the road and the cruiser's interior. Departments use this kind of system for officer safety, crash documentation, and accountability for the officers themselves. Its purpose is fleet and officer monitoring, and it runs on a separate platform from the Flock license plate network in Cherokee County.

The Cherokee arrests are a timely reminder that any police data system is only as trustworthy as the governance around it. A dual facing camera records the officer and others in the cruiser cabin, plus whoever the road camera happens to capture. Continuous GPS telematics logs everywhere those 40 vehicles go, all day, every day. That data lives on a private vendor's servers and can be reached through an API. So every question we are asking the sheriff's office applies here too: Who can access the footage and location data? How long is it retained? Who audits the access logs, and how often? What can Samsara itself do with the data, and can any of it be queried by outside or federal agencies? Are those answers written into policy, or left to a vendor's default settings?

Buying the system is a council decision. Governing it well is a community responsibility. Before Woodstock commits to a 36 month, roughly $94,000 contract, residents have every right to see a written data governance, retention, and audit policy adopted in public, in front of the people whose data it will hold.

The bottom line

The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office found the misuse and acted on it. Three arrests from one round of audits is a warning. We want the full findings made public, a clear and ongoing audit schedule, and real answers about who was surveilled and why. As our own city governments move to buy the next cloud based surveillance and tracking system, we want the oversight written down before the cameras go up.

Surveillance technology in our communities should come with public rules, public audits, and public accountability. North Georgia families deserve all three.