A Moody City Council meeting turned tense Monday night when resident Chris Pridmore pressed Mayor Nick Rutledge over safeguards governing the city’s Flock license plate reader system, months after the police department fired an officer for violating its Flock policy. The exchange capped weeks of simmering frustration in the St. Clair County city of roughly 14,000, where officials insist the system worked exactly as intended and skeptics say firing one officer isn’t the same as fixing the problem.
Moody Police fired the officer in July after an internal investigation found a violation of the department’s Flock policy, according to WBMA. Pridmore told the station he believes the city hasn’t done enough publicly to address the misuse, and he’s calling for greater oversight and public discussion going forward. He says he supports law enforcement but wants public access to audit logs so residents can evaluate how the system is actually being used.
Rutledge sees it differently, telling WBMA the safeguards worked precisely because the officer was identified and terminated. Moody Police Chief Reece Smith acknowledged officers can misuse the technology but said anyone who violates Flock policy for a non-law-enforcement reason should be fired. Smith supports strengthening the laws governing Flock technology but opposes scrapping it altogether, arguing that people have no expectation of privacy for a vehicle’s exterior on public roadways.
What the City’s Policy Actually Requires
Moody has used Flock since 2019, and its license plate reader policy requires that every search serve a criminal justice or public-safety purpose, backed by a dispatch-generated case number, per WBMA’s review of the policy. The department must document who accessed data, when, and why, and it must log any information shared with other agencies. Selling the data is prohibited, and sharing it for purposes unrelated to criminal justice or public safety is restricted — rules the department says follow the Alabama Administrative Code governing license plate recognition systems. That code, Chapter 265-X-6, requires agencies statewide to log the accessing officer’s name, timestamp, and purpose for every search while barring data sharing or sales for non-public-safety reasons…