The Athens-Clarke County Police Department will open a new surveillance hub later this month called the “Real Time Crime Center” which will greatly expand the department’s monitoring capabilities. Police believe the new center may lower crime rates by helping bring criminals to justice more quickly and efficiently, but some Athens residents fear the loss of privacy as the government’s surveillance network continues to expand.
In this article, we’ll examine what the Real Time Crime Center is, what it can do, why police are excited about it and why some Athenians oppose these surveillance technologies.
What is the Real Time Crime Center?
The RTCC is a new surveillance hub being built at the police department’s headquarters on Lexington Road. Crime analysts working there will be able to access live feeds from over 1,000 security cameras to assist police in their investigations. In addition, analysts will have access to license plate readers, AI facial recognition, national intelligence databases and other tools.
By itself, the Real Time Crime Center does not give police any new technological capabilities; it’s just a central location for police analysts to do their work. Having all of their tools in one place will allow these analysts to make more efficient use of the technologies they’ve had access to for years.
Police have monitored downtown Athens for crime in real time ever since they installed 15 security cameras there in 2004. Today, ACCPD cameras are still concentrated in the downtown area, but the number of cameras police have access to has grown dramatically. The University of Georgia alone has about 200 cameras on campus that ACCPD can access as needed.
Over a dozen private businesses and apartment complexes also share their security feeds directly with ACCPD in real time. For example, cameras at ‘The Mark’ apartment complex have already been used to help find at least one missing person.
The number of businesses that share their cameras with police is still relatively small, but it’s “growing every day,” according to ACCPD Crime and Intelligence Analyst Nick Barker. Each integration requires complex technical work and long legal agreements, which place a limit on how quickly ACCPD can expand their camera network. Most businesses share their exterior cameras with police but not interior ones, Barker said, because interior footage is “not as useful” and “would bring up privacy issues.”
Homeowners can also sign up to share their Ring doorbell cams or other security camera footage with ACCPD in case it might be useful in solving crime, although these camera feeds cannot be shared directly in real time due to technical issues.
Currently, ACCPD has two analysts working to process intelligence and provide real-time updates to police officers in the field. Barker says that the information they provide can be extremely helpful to law enforcement as they try to bring criminals to justice.
“We had a shooting in an apartment complex a couple months ago. I had access to the cameras in the complex, and I was able to tell the officer ‘he’s in apartment 202. He literally went in there right now,’” Barker explained. “When we hear ‘real-time,’ a lot of people think it’s like [the 2002 movie] Minority Report and we’re predicting crime, but that’s not the way it works. What we’re doing 99% of the time is hopping on a call in real-time to assist the officer in the field.”
ACCPD Lieutenant Katie Jenkins told APN that these surveillance technologies have been “priceless” for law enforcement. “If you’re a bad guy, the RTCC is your worst nightmare,” Jenkins said.
Other surveillance technologies
In addition to their large and growing camera network, ACCPD use a variety of other surveillance tools and databases in their work. For example, police have access to several intelligence databases, such as Accurint, that harvest information about potential suspects from commercial and other sources. Police also use facial recognition technology to help them identify persons of interest, although Barker says the technology is useful only in rare cases from a low-resolution image such as a security camera feed.
License plate readers
One of the most powerful new technologies police use in their day to day work are license plate readers. These are cameras that take pictures of the license plates of every car as they pass by on the road. Athens has dozens of license plate readers scattered across town at various intersections that track the locations of every car in Athens, every day, all the time.
Police make use of our location data in various ways, including tracking suspects, but the most common use is to find stolen cars and to receive other real-time alerts, according to Barker.
“We can get alerted on cars that are listed as stolen, or those associated with a missing person, or a wanted person. We would vet that alert first to see if it is still active, and to see if it’s the right car. But once we vet the information, we get it out to [police on] patrol,” Barker told APN.
ACCPD has used license plate readers to collect the locations of every vehicle on our roads since 2015. In 2020, ACCPD switched to their current vendor, Flock Safety. Flock processes the data received by its cameras and cross-checks against the National Crime Information Center database of stolen vehicles and wanted persons. If it finds a match, Flock then sends an alert to ACCPD as described by Barker.
ACCPD may also choose to query Flock’s database to find a specific vehicle. Since they have data sharing agreements with many law enforcement agencies across the state who also have Flock contracts, crime analysts like Barker have the ability to track any vehicle in any of these jurisdictions at any time without a warrant.
“There are tons of different agencies around the state of Georgia that we have access to, and they have access to ours,” Barker said. “We opt into that and just kind of naturally share with each other. It makes it really effective, so when we have a stolen car and it hits somewhere in Barrow County or Gwinnett County, they can get alerted to it.”
Private groups like homeowners associations are sometimes also Flock customers. Law enforcement agencies can gain access to their data as well, but any data obtained from law enforcement cameras is not shared with private Flock customers.
Flock retains ownership of their physical cameras, but not the data, which it deletes after 30 days. If ACCPD needs the data for a case, ACCPD must download it within the 30-day window.
Barker says the Flock cameras have been extremely helpful for police and have led to the rapid arrest of violent criminals.
“Since 2020, we’ve had nearly 600 successes just using Flock, and a lot of those we may not have been able to prosecute without the license plate data,” Barker said. “A perfect example happened last year after the murder of a three-year old at Hallmark mobile home park. One gang came to shoot at another gang, but missed and the bullet went into a trailer and killed a three-year old. We already had a relationship with Hallmark and had a Flock camera there. We found a white SUV that entered and left the park at the time of the shooting, so we tracked that vehicle and we had the driver in custody within an hour. Without the [license plate readers], we would have never known who it was.”
Community opinion
Given the large and growing amount of footage and intelligence data police have to process, ACCPD requested five new positions for the Real Time Crime Center during the last round of budget negotiations, bringing the total number of authorized employees at the center to seven (six analysts and one supervisor). In June, the ACC Commission fully funded this request by allocating $419,000.
Several community members spoke during public hearings about the Real Time Crime Center’s budget request, with some speaking in favor and some opposed.
“If you want to sustain the recent gains in crime reduction, you must ensure that you’re not just adequately staffing officers in the field, but also the analysis and support staff that provide the data and insights that guide those deployments,” explained Susan Monteverde, an activist with pro-policing group SafeD Athens.
Felix Bell, the vice-chair of the Public Safety Civilian Oversight Board, disagreed sharply, saying that the Real Time Crime Center would not keep Athenians safe.
“[The RTCC] will increase and validate the use of over-policing through surveillance which will increase political violence against Athenians. In particular, Black, brown, indigenous and transgender Athenians are most at risk,” Bell said. “Flock [data] can be accessed and has been accessed by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and other federal agencies, even in areas where it is illegal to do so.”
Mass surveillance in the age of Trump
Commissioner Melissa Link made an attempt to pull funding from the Real Time Crime Center at the last minute, saying that she feared the data may be used maliciously by the federal government.
“I am increasingly wary of the surveillance culture,” Link said. “I really fear state or federal laws that might mandate that ACC Police share their surveillance information with federal agents who might execute unjust, unconstitutional political persecutions.”
Commissioner Patrick Davenport seconded Link’s motion, but it failed to pass. Commissioner Carol Myers also voted with Link and Davenport, although not out of a desire to defund the Real Time Crime Center.
Even if Link’s motion had passed, it likely would have done nothing to slow the growth of ACCPD’s surveillance apparatus, since the police budget already had enough funding to launch the Real Time Crime Center this year. However, these comments from commissioners and the public alike show that some Athenians have a real and growing fear of how law enforcement resources may be misused during the administration of President Donald Trump.
The American Civil Liberties Union says that surveillance technologies like license plate readers are “dangerously powerful and unregulated” and are “contributing to the creation of a centralized mass surveillance system of Orwellian scope.” While the ACLU does not oppose the use of license plate readers to find stolen cars or for other legitimate law enforcement purposes, they urge that the data should be deleted within three minutes after collection and that it should not be shared with other law enforcement agencies, among other recommendations.
The potential for abuse
The Libertarian Party of Georgia, including the local party here in Athens, likewise opposes the use of these technologies, citing the ways in which surveillance powers can be misused.
“Mass surveillance is a violation of privacy and a threat to civil liberties,” said Elizabeth Melton Gallimore, the executive director of the Libertarian Party of Georgia. “There are numerous examples of how the collection of this data is not only ineffective but is also subject to abuse.”
In 2021, a Black family in Aurora, Colorado was removed from their car at gunpoint and handcuffed by police simply because their car shared a license plate number with a stolen motorcycle from another state. The family received a $1.9 million settlement last year.
In 2023, the police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas abused his access to the Flock system to stalk his ex-girlfriend, tracking her car 228 times over a four-month period. He resigned and was sentenced to 18 months of probation.
Just recently, the city of Evanston, Illinois terminated its contract with Flock Safety after discovering that the company was sharing its data with US Customs and Border Protection in violation of state law. While that is illegal in Illinois, no such law exists in Georgia that would prevent local surveillance data from being shared in this way.
ACCPD does not directly share data with any federal agency, according to Barker. Currently, if a federal agency is interested in Athens’ data, they must make a specific request and provide a justification, which may be denied.
CLARIFICATION (11/29/25): Federal agencies like ICE must make a request to ACCPD for license plate data only if they want to get it directly from ACCPD itself. If Flock Safety chooses to share the data as they did in the Evanston case, it’s possible that ACCPD would not even be informed that their data was compromised. However, Flock Safety claims that they do not share data in this way.
Barker says that he is aware of all of the incidents listed above and that he understands why some oppose these surveillance technologies. Even so, he insists that ACCPD has safeguards in place that will prevent the Real Time Crime Center and the data it collects from being misused.
“I understand where [detractors] are coming from. When it gets in the news, it’s being misused. They don’t know what they’re doing,” Barker said with some frustration at the improper handling of the technology in other agencies. “We’re not interested in being ‘big brother.’ We’re trying to keep the community safe and be as effective as we can as a police department. We’re trying to build that trust with the community so they know that we’re using those tools to help them, not hinder them.”
Barker explained that ACCPD performs regular audits of their analysts’ use of tools like license plate readers to make sure they follow proper procedures.
“There are very strict guardrails put in place. Everything needs a reason to be searched, and that gets audited by somebody who was not involved [with that case]. Every click of a button is audited. We can see every little thing that analysts do with the system.”
Barker says that he hopes the Real Time Crime Center will be complete and fully functional by the Georgia-Alabama game on September 27. ACCPD analysts are typically busy on game days monitoring downtown video feeds to ensure that traffic laws are followed and that drunk driving is minimized.
The Real Time Crime Center was made possible in part through a $500,000 donation from the QuikTrip corporation via the Athens-Clarke Police Foundation. State law allows people or corporations to donate a portion of their taxes to a police foundation instead of paying it all directly to the state government.
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5 thoughts on “We’re being watched: ACCPD surveillance hub opening soon”
So? What are you doing that you’re afraid to be surveilled?!
You mean to tell me you didn’t know this has been going on for decades? There’s already been the surveillance devices everywhere, they are probably replacing the ones that are aging.
It’s amazing how slow you are to catch on, mainly because you refuse to look at the evidence that some of us provide you.
I appreciate that someone cared enough to write this article, but would have appreciated it even more had it gone into more depth fleshing out why ACC’s contract with this particular vendor—Flock—creates a real, documented danger of its surveillance technology being used by the federal government, specifically ICE, to terrorize, deport, and kill brown people who are minding their own business.
Just reading the linked article about what happened in the Illiois community that contracted with Flock for the same service as Athens, proves that ICE can and has hacked Flock’s community-surveillance systems, in a city where there was no willful data-sharing with federal agencies, and where there WERE “guard rails” in place about data sharing. And that it happened without the knowledge of either the city officials in charge of managing the equipment OR the vendor itself! Despite assurances like Barker’s (and even Flock).
This article doesn’t flesh that out, or bother to ask uncomfortable questions from sources like Barker to find out what is ACTUALLY specifically different in Athens that would prevent the exact same thing from happening, here, as happened in Illinois. Especially since ALL of the vague reasons he gave why that wouldn’t happen here were also things that were true of the Illinois community where it did actually happen.
I mean, you dont have to look twice at the turnout of a rainy-day no-kings protest to know that those are obvious follow-up questions that a LOT of Athenians would consider worth asking.
There is nothing to prevent that from happening here, that’s why I didn’t ask.
From the article: “While that is illegal in Illinois, no such law exists in Georgia that would prevent local surveillance data from being shared in this way.”
I probably should have made a bigger deal about this sentence, you’re right I think. There is nothing to prevent Flock from sharing the data, full stop. Asking Barker additional questions wouldn’t have helped because we know the answer already. Sometimes I try hard to be neutral on issues where I feel passionately, for better or worse. That’s probably why I didn’t emphasize this point more. Or maybe I messed up a little, you’re right this is important.
I’ll go further and say that I assume it is happening. The data may also be shared with criminals or other bad faith actors in a way that threatens all of us. I will make a slight edit to that section to clarify this point.
I added this clarification:
“Federal agencies like ICE must make a request to ACCPD for license plate data only if they want to get it directly from ACCPD itself. If Flock Safety chooses to share the data as they did in the Evanston case, it’s possible that ACCPD would not even be informed that their data was compromised. However, Flock Safety claims that they do not share data in this way.”
Thank you for your prompt response and clarification!! It’s great to see a journalist be so invested and quick to take feedback on their work! I am impressed.