Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog
It seems like every day I hear another FLOCK camera story in the news, and usually it’s not good. Whether cities should even use FLOCK cameras is now largely up for debate. Those in favor cite instances where FLOCK cameras have located criminal suspects or missing or kidnapped children. Those against often cite their Constitutional right of privacy, especially where police do not have a warrant to surveil your whereabouts without your permission or knowledge.
I recently represented a young woman who was wrongfully arrested solely based on the use of a FLOCK camera in the City of Powder Springs in Cobb County. I won’t characterize it as the “improper” use of the FLOCK camera, but it was, at a minimum, the unknowledgeable, untrained use of a FLOCK camera that led to her wrongful arrest. In that case, the day before my client’s wrongful arrest, a man and his girlfriend, driving a black Dodge Charger, committed an armed robbery of a citizen in a large parking lot of a shopping center. This shopping center had several stores in it, including a Wal-Mart and a Pizza Hut. My client had just moved to Powder Springs that very day. She happened to drive a blue Dodge Charger. She went to the Wal-mart that day to pick up cleaning supplies for the home she had just moved into. On the day after the armed robbery, my client and her daughter drove to this shopping center from their home just around the corner to pick up a pizza for dinner. It was then that chaos began, due to the misuse of a FLOCK camera.
The City of Powder Springs illegally stopped my client, whose young daughter was in the back seat of their car, forced my client out of her car and to the ground, hand-cuffed her, all the time with their guns drawn and aimed at her while yelling at them “Get out of the car!! Get out of the car!! Get down on the ground!!”” This occurred without a warrant. My client was taken in the back seat of a police car to the police station, wrongfully detained, illegally searched, and was wrongfully accused of robbing someone. The police department then towed her car, the blue Charger.
