(The Epoch Times)—A growing number of municipalities are ending their use of Flock Safety cameras amid concerns about how the automated license plate readers capture people’s movement.
Flock has installed thousands of cameras across 49 states, and the data is accessible to law enforcement agencies through the Flock platform.
Tempe, Arizona, officials said on Wednesday they’ve turned off their Flock system and are ending their contract with the company.
“While the cameras have helped Tempe Police solve crimes, recent misuse of automated license plate reader systems in Arizona and nationwide has raised concerns about the risks that come with the technology,” the city said, while noting it found no misuse of its own Flock system.
Tempe Mayor Corey Woods said the cameras have helped police officers do their jobs, “but the risk of misuse is too great.”
“We have to be able to provide public safety in a way that maintains the trust of our community,” he said. “For Tempe, that means taking these cameras down.”
Cave Creek, also in Arizona; Bellingham, Massachusetts; and several Texas counties are among the other municipalities that said this month they’re ending their use of Flock cameras.
Bellingham Police Chief Kenneth Fitzgerald said in a statement that during a recent criminal investigation, officials learned that a Flock feature called Free Form, an artificial intelligence-powered tool that can search video information using plain language, was available through the cameras.
“Those features go beyond what most people would think of as a traditional license plate reader,” he said. “That concerned me because I had previously told the public, based on our understanding of the system, that our Flock technology was a license plate reader only.”
John Shirley, constable of a precinct in Hood County, Texas, said that after county commissioners voted to remove the cameras, he would be covering them until they could be removed.
“These cameras were constantly scanning and recording regular folks just going about their day. That kind of permanent, warrantless tracking doesn’t belong in a free society,” Shirley said in an Aug. 15 post on Facebook. “By unplugging and covering them, we’re making it clear: privacy isn’t optional, and mass surveillance isn’t how we do things here.”
Multiple officers have been charged with crimes for allegedly misusing data from the Flock system, including an officer in North Carolina.
More than 100 jurisdictions have canceled contracts with Flock and other automated license plate reader providers, according to a database from the Institute of Justice, a nonprofit law firm that says it aims to end government abuse.
“Local governments have good reasons to want to stem the proliferation of these mass surveillance tools,” Michael Soyfer, an attorney with the institute, said in a statement.
“Rather than narrowly target criminals, [automated license plate readers] collect troves of data on ordinary people’s movements and compile them in a database officers can freely access on demand. That has predictably led to widespread abuse, which will continue until we implement robust safeguards like a warrant requirement.”
Flock, which did not respond to a request for comment, announced changes to its platform earlier in August, including narrowing the retention time for data from 30 days to one week, with certain exceptions.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a video statement that this means that “every image our cameras capture is by default purged from the customer’s database after one week, unless it becomes evidence in an active criminal investigation.”
