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At least 10 local governments and police departments have since moved to restrict or ban the use of Flock Safety cameras, according to a report by TechCrunch. The company makes a range of products, including license plate readers, drones and gunshot detectors. There are over 100,000 Flock cameras deployed across the country.
Monroe, Ohio; Newburgh, New York; Richmond, VA; Hopkinton and New Bedford, MA; and Lansing, MI are a few of the local governments that have recently ended their contracts with the company. In East Bridgewater and Grafton, MA police will no longer be using the cameras to track the license plates of local residents. In League City, TX a citywide vote was held this week to decide the fate of the readers and they were voted out. The cameras there are set to come down.
A big part of this fight is determining who gets to watch the watchers. For one, the police in Asheville, North Carolina lost access to the data of license plates captured by Flock Safety cameras in the city after the city council voted to terminate the contract with the company in August. El Paso County Sheriff Joseph Roybal said in a press release that discontinuing Flock Safety cameras in the county was the “right decision.” “We have the tools, training, and experience to locate and apprehend criminals without relying on Flock cameras,” he said.
The abuse of License Plate Readers is not theoretical. A police officer in Brentwood, MO was recently accused of using the cameras to stalk his ex-wife during their divorce. In September, a police officer in Lufkin, TX was sentenced to prison for using information from Flock Safety cameras to monitor his ex-girlfriend and her family.
Similarly, Ithaca was reportedly reviewing how local license plate data was queried by federal agents, including reports of unauthorized federal queries of local Flock Safety plate reader data, leading to a resolution to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety to automatically read license plates of drivers in the city. Flock Safety does not sell information and has no contract with ICE, Flock Safety notes that each customer can choose whether or not to share information detected by their own Flock Safety readers.
Adam Schwartz of the non-profit civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation told TechCrunch that police departments frequently purchase the system without the council’s involvement and that grassroots activists have been demanding that city councils refuse to pay for so-called “automatic license plate readers” for years. “Many city councils are listening,” he said.
While Cleveland opted to extend the contract for the system of Flock Safety cameras of license plate readers on corners of the city, it did so after agreeing to limit use of the system for immigration-related searches and to restrict access to the database of plates scanned by police on the force. Rep. Thomas Massie introduced the Flock-Off Act to bar federal money for this style of surveillance.
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