Are Flock cameras essential crime-fighting gadgets, or a step toward the panopticon?
What are Flock cameras?
They’re shoebox-size automated license plate readers that capture still images of passing cars. Typically mounted on poles about 10 feet high, they’re powered by solar panels and linked to cellular networks. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley founded the company in 2017 because he was fed up with theft in Atlanta, his hometown. The company initially leased cameras to homeowners associations, and by 2020, police departments started buying subscriptions. There are now more than 120,000 Flock cameras in the U.S., deployed by some 7,000 law enforcement agencies. But the backlash has grown just as quickly. Cities are canceling contracts, lawmakers from both parties are drawing up restrictions, and vigilantes have been vandalizing the cameras so they can’t snap pictures. “It’s mass surveillance,” says Cris van Pelt, creator of the police log tracking site HaveIBeenFlocked.com. “It has a huge potential for abuse and very, very little oversight.”
What happens to the images?
The surveillance photos can be uploaded to a vast, searchable database. When a previously flagged or wanted vehicle—which Flock’s AI software can identify by license plate, make, model, color, and even dents and bumper stickers—passes by a camera, local law enforcement receives an alert. Flock Safety says its equipment has assisted in 20% of cleared cases in the jurisdictions that use it, and helped locate more than 10,000 missing people. Providence, R.I., officials said Flock was “instrumental” in locating within hours a masked gunman who killed two people at Brown University last year. And one police chief in Washington state said that since installing Flock, his city of Lakewood has experienced a rare 15-month stretch without a homicide.
What do critics say?
People across the political spectrum—both Tucker Carlson and Bernie Sanders have bashed Flock—argue that its system violates the Fourth Amendment. Will Freeman, an anti-Flock activist, called it a “warrantless surveillance dragnet” in a lawsuit filed in May against the city of Boulder. So far, the courts have disagreed, saying there’s no expectation of privacy on public roads. Immigration activists are concerned about data sharing with ICE or Customs and Border Protection. They note that while Flock Safety has no federal contracts, local police could choose to share information with the feds. Meanwhile, the system isn’t perfect, and its errors can lead to harrowing consequences. When a Flock camera misread a “7” as a “2” on a car in Toledo, falsely matching a stolen car, the vehicle’s owner, Brandon Upchurch, was stopped at gunpoint, mauled by a police dog, and jailed for hours before being released. “I’m traumatized for real,” said Upchurch, who is Black. “If we would have sneezed wrong, it would have ended bad.”
Have police abused the system?
Dozens of law enforcement officers have been charged with or accused of using Flock for unauthorized tracking, mostly to stalk their current or former romantic partners. A Georgia police chief looked up the tags of his girlfriend and her teenage daughter 600 times to track their movements; he was arrested and died of apparent suicide. One woman, a sheriff’s deputy in Wisconsin who requested anonymity, told The Washington Post that her ex, a colleague, searched her license plate over a dozen times a day. “I didn’t leave my house for a week,” she said. One Florida officer, fired after an internal-affairs investigation discovered he’d made 192 inappropriate Flock searches, said, “Pretty much everybody abuses that computer system.” An advocacy group in Joplin, Mo., requested audit logs from the city police department and found that 85% of Flock searches had a one-word justification—like “suspicious” or “drugs”—and that fewer than 3% of searches had a case number.
What does the public think?
Flock appears to be hugely unpopular. Vigilantes have covered the cameras in trash bags, splattered them with paint, and even sawed them down. Freeman, the Boulder-based activist, has launched the app DeFlock, where users can map camera locations; more than 350,000 people have downloaded the app. Flock’s business is still growing, but the backlash has led more than 50 jurisdictions to cut ties with the firm this year. In July alone, 21 groups, including the Los Angeles Police Department, stopped using Flock or began the process of doing so. Local governments and Congress are drafting legislation to regulate the cameras’ use. In the Senate, Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has opened an investigation into how Flock uses its data. In the House, Keith Self (R-Texas) introduced a bill to require federal agencies to get a warrant before accessing any similar data. “This is not a Left issue, not a Right issue,” Self said. “It is a personal issue.”
How has Flock responded?
Langley points out that the cameras don’t do facial recognition and the customer, not Flock, owns the images. “Think about the tooling that we ask local law enforcement to use,” he says. “We give them a weapon, a gun, a taser, yet we’re afraid to give them a camera that reads a license plate on a public road?” As for misuse, the company says, Flock’s records of search logs allow departments to identify which cops abuse their power. Still, the recent bad press spurred the firm to implement changes it says make it harder to use the system for anything other than legitimate crime-solving. Case codes to justify a search, previously optional, will be mandatory, and the audit log will be upgraded so that Flock can detect abnormal search patterns and block those users. The default time for storing images before deletion, currently 30 days, will drop to a week. Yet the DeFlock activists aren’t placated. “No guardrails,” the group said in response to the new guidelines. “No regulations. No ‘only if they really need to’ pinkie promises. [The cameras] are coming down.
