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IPSWICH — While dozens of communities across the country are ending contracts with Flock Safety amid growing privacy concerns, the Ipswich Local News found that a handful of North Shore police departments have not opted into the surveillance technology in the first place.
Police chiefs in Ipswich, Rowley, Essex, Newbury, Georgetown, Hamilton, Wenham, and Boxford said their departments do not have contracts with Flock.
The area appears to be a Flock desert. While some businesses and schools also operate the cameras, DeFlock, a crowd-sourced site that maps automatic license plate readers including Flock, does not show any in the area.
The closest documented cameras on DeFlock are in Danvers, Andover, and Haverhill.
Most area chiefs said they don’t use Flock because it is costly. Many also said they would not have much use for the cameras due to low crime rates — police often use Flock for criminal investigations.
Some chiefs also expressed concerns about Flock’s data sharing policies and officer misuse. But many said it could be a helpful tool in investigations, so long as there are proper guardrails in place.
What is Flock
Flock, founded in 2017, makes surveillance technology including automated license plate reader cameras, which automatically capture images of all passing vehicles with timestamps and location information.
The cameras can be installed along roads, intersections, and businesses or mounted on police cars. Using artificial intelligence, the technology turns a vehicle’s license plate, make, model, color, and other details into searchable information.
Law enforcement agencies can choose to share the data with other agencies through a searchable network. Departments can have ongoing access to another department’s system, and they do not need to obtain a warrant to access the information.
More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 businesses across 49 states use Flock, according to its website, making it the largest licence plate reader network in the country.
Public scrutiny
The company has recently come under intense public scrutiny after reports surfaced of police officers misusing the technology. At least four Massachusetts officers have been placed on leave or fired for abusing Flock in the past two weeks — two of them for stalking ex-girlfriends, according to The Boston Globe.
Reports from Business Insider and other publications have also shed light on the technology’s plate-reading errors, leading to the detention of innocent people in at least a dozen incidents across the country.
Some agencies have also reportedly shared data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to 404 Media. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found that authorities in Texas allegedly used Flock to track a woman suspected of having an abortion.
Flock announced on Aug. 13 it was changing some features to help prevent misuse, including shortening data retention from 30 to seven days — unless local laws or investigations warrant otherwise — and requiring law enforcement to implement its misuse detection feature, which will proactively lock officers out for suspected misuse.
Flock has also encouraged customers to adopt a use policy, implement a regular auditing schedule, and confirm computer translations of license plate scans.
The company maintains that it helps communities investigate crimes and respond to emergencies, and investigators credited Flock for helping locate the Brown University shooting suspect.
Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Not here on the North Shore
Many local police chiefs said they don’t operate Flock cameras because of the cost, especially for how infrequently they would expect to use them. In Ipswich, for instance, Police Chief Paul Nikas said installing a Flock camera would cost roughly $4,000 a year.
“It’s a lot of money for how often we would use it and need it,” he said.
The reason many departments use Flock is for criminal investigations, Hamilton Police Chief Edward J. Guy III said, and the area has relatively low crime rates, so the amount his department would likely use the cameras would not justify the cost.
“There are other things that we could utilize budgetary money for as far as equipment and training that would benefit … the Hamilton Police Department more than having a Flock camera that maybe once a year or once every two years may assist in an investigation,” Guy said.
Similarly, Newbury Police Chief Patricia Fisher told the Local News she has not deeply explored digital license plate reader (DLR) programs because her department has other capital spending priorities.
“Although very valuable in criminal investigations, DLR programs are costly,” Fisher said. “In my opinion, the benefit-cost-ratio cannot be justified for the Town of Newbury’s criminal investigatory needs compared to that of our current financial capacity.”
In more rural towns like Boxford that don’t have a downtown area or business district, Flock cameras would be “catching the activity of residents more than anything else,” Police Chief James Riter said.
Georgetown Police Chief David Sedgwick said tools like Flock would be incredibly useful in many situations beyond criminal investigations, however, like when a loved one with dementia has gone missing or to help smaller departments already stretched thin.
“It’s an invaluable tool that I think all police departments should have,” Sedgwick said. “It just seems it’s getting a bad rap lately because it seems like a privacy issue, however, your license plate has no expectation of privacy.”
Privacy and expectations
Massachusetts license plates are considered state property, and when out in public, no one has privacy rights to their cars, Nikas said.
“Anybody can look at a license plate,” he said. “The information we get is who actually owns it and where it’s been, and that type of information we only use during investigations.”
While that information is private, Nikas also pointed out that almost everyone is on camera 24/7 because of the prevalence of home and business security cameras and cameras on cellphones.
Police departments often ask businesses or residents to share this kind of footage if it can help an investigation, like when property is vandalized, or other situations, like when a dog goes missing, Essex Police Chief Thomas Shamshak said.
Some chiefs, including Nikas and Riter, said their departments have used data from other agencies’ Flock cameras in investigations, but they have to ask for specific data, Nikas said, and do not maintain access to the agencies’ information “for information’s sake.”
Nikas said when Flock approached him more than a year ago seeking a contract, he did not pursue it because of the sharing and data storing policies. His department uses another automated license plate reader, Axon, on its cruisers — Nikas said he chose it because the data is kept strictly with the department.
“We balance the need to solve crimes with the need to keep people’s information private,” he said.
While license plates are public, Guy said it matters how Flock and people with access to Flock are using that information. If officers are misusing the technology, he said that is a serious concern.
Riter said officer misuse comes down to policies, training, and accountability within each police department.
“It’s up to every individual police department to make sure they have proper policies and procedures,” he said.
Cameras in general are very helpful to aid public safety, especially in solving crimes, locating missing persons, establishing investigative timelines, and deterring vandalism, Shamshak said.
While he does not have a specific comment on Flock, he said data agreements need to be worked out with the company and municipalities, and he pointed out that audit systems in place appear to be working to capture officer misuse.
Nikas said he believes Flock also needs to strengthen its sharing, privacy, and transparency policies, which it appears to be trying to do.
“There is definitely an investigative tool there that helps protect the public, but it just has to be managed properly,” Nikas said.
