Georgia Police Chief Michael Steffman Tracked His Ex Six Hundred Times and He Is Only One of Fifty

A Georgia police chief secretly tracked his ex girlfriend and her teenage daughter six hundred times using government cameras.

Investigators say he is only one of at least fifty officers nationwide caught turning a crime fighting network into a stalking tool.

Now Republicans in Congress want to shut the whole surveillance operation down before it happens to you.

A Police Chief Turned Public Safety Cameras Into a Personal Surveillance Weapon

Marci Bakely is a single mother in Jefferson, Georgia.

Her ex boyfriend was Michael Steffman, the police chief of nearby Braselton.

Steffman had access to Flock Safety's network of AI powered license plate cameras, a system sold to police as a tool to catch car thieves and violent criminals.

He used it to watch Bakely instead.

Court records show Steffman ran her plate and her teenage daughter's plate roughly 600 times.

By November he was in handcuffs, booked on charges of stalking, harassment, and misusing the license plate system.

Bakely never got a warning from the system, a warrant from a judge, or a knock on her door.

She found out the way most victims do, when he slipped and told her himself.

Steffman is not an outlier.

Prosecutors and internal investigators have accused at least 50 officers in state after state of misusing Flock and competing camera systems for personal reasons.

Investigators tied 26 of those cases directly to romantic obsession, officers spying on wives, girlfriends, old flames, or women they had simply noticed.

A former Kansas police chief admitted to tracking his ex girlfriend's car, and a Kansas officer named Victor Heiar used the same kind of system to hunt down his estranged wife.

Heiar later pleaded guilty to computer crime and stalking after she told detectives she no longer felt safe or private anywhere.

One Wisconsin officer ran the plates just to find out if his ex had gone to an abortion clinic.

None of this is new for police databases.

Officers have abused confidential law enforcement systems for personal spying for decades, but Flock's network changes the scale entirely.

The cameras run around the clock in more than 6,000 communities, capturing every plate that passes, and officers can search the whole history without a warrant or an active case number.

Fifty Rogue Cops Later Republicans Are Finally Moving to Shut It Down

Flock's chief executive, Garrett Langley, once dismissed the people raising alarms about his product as a "terroristic organization."

He has since walked the comment back and admitted he was wrong to say it.

The apology came only after Republicans in Washington started drafting bills to defund the entire system.

Tennessee's Tim Burchett introduced H.R. 9800, legislation that would lock federal agencies out of buying, funding, or tapping into these camera networks altogether.

His pitch to reporters was blunt: "We gotta ban these dadgum things."

Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry tried attaching a restriction in committee and vowed the fight continues after it failed.

Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie is now drafting a bill to pull federal funding from any city or police department that uses the cameras to surveil "law abiding citizens."

Massie previously partnered with Colorado's Lauren Boebert on legislation that would force agencies to get a judge's warrant before pulling this kind of tracking data.

Three Republican bills in a matter of weeks is not a coincidence.

It is a warning shot at a surveillance industry that grew faster than anyone bothered to write rules for it.

The System Was Never Designed to Stop This

Flock built a nationwide tracking grid and left the guardrails up to roughly 18,000 individual police agencies, each making its own rules or making none at all.

It is what happens when a private company hands badge holders this much power and trusts them to police themselves.

A sheriff can fire an officer after the damage is done, but nothing stops the next Michael Steffman from opening the app tonight.

Republicans pushing these bills are not attacking law enforcement.

They are drawing a line between catching criminals and letting cops stalk whoever they want, and that line should have existed before Marci Bakely ever needed it.

Sources:

• Breitbart News, "50+ Police Officers Accused of Using Flock License Plate Cameras to Stalk People," Breitbart, August 3, 2026.
• Rahul Sidhu, "Think Of The Children! Flock Uses Emotional Blackmail To Sell Mass Surveillance," Daily Caller, August 4, 2026.
• Staff, "Don't Flock Me: Massie Readies Bill to Yank Federal Cash From Cities and Police Departments Running Flock Cameras," ZeroHedge, July 28, 2026.
• Staff, "Don't Flock Me: Massie Readies Bill to Yank Federal Cash From Cities and Police Departments Running Flock Cameras," The Liberty Daily, July 28, 2026.
• WZTV Fox 17 News Staff, "Flock Safety Responds to Tennessee Congressman's Surveillance Bill," Fox 17 News, July 31, 2026.