Cities Dump Flock Cameras; Rivals Grab Contracts
Cities Dump Flock Cameras; Rivals Grab Contracts
The News
Flock Safety, the license plate camera company now facing a nationwide revolt over privacy, is losing city contracts — and its competitors are moving in to take them.
About 100 cities have deactivated cameras, rejected deals or canceled contracts, according to the crowdsourced database DeFlock.org, NPR reported Saturday. Stateline, cited by The Independent, counts more than 50 cities and law enforcement agencies that have canceled, suspended or rejected Flock contracts since the start of the year.
Rivals Axon, Motorola Solutions and Verkada sell similar automated license plate readers and have for years. Denver and Longmont, Colorado, both signed with Flock competitors this year, including Axon.
Privacy experts told NPR the switch fixes nothing. "You're just replacing one color of camera for another," said Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Timeline
More than 130,000 automated license plate readers are now in use in cities and towns across the country, according to DeFlock.org. The cameras photograph the backs of cars and use AI to log details such as make, model and color, and police can search Flock's shared national database — including for vehicles outside their own jurisdiction.
The backlash built on documented abuses. A Washington Post investigation published Aug. 2 found officers used the system to track romantic partners and exes. In Texas, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, deputies used Flock data to help investigate a woman suspected of traveling to have an abortion. NPR has reported cases where data was shared more widely than local officials knew, including with federal immigration agencies.
Narragansett, Rhode Island's Town Council voted unanimously to end its Flock contract early over privacy and surveillance concerns.
Three days later, Glocester, Rhode Island's Town Council voted 4-1 to terminate its contract and pull the cameras, at a potential cost of $10,000 to $15,000 to the town.
Flock announced new guardrails — required misuse-detection tools, flags on unusual searches, searches tied to specific criminal cases, and a recommended data retention period cut from 30 days to seven.
Members of DeFlock DC, a grassroots group pushing to end all contracts between the Metropolitan Police Department and Flock, packed a Washington public library meeting room to show residents how the cameras work and where they are.
A man dressed as Darth Vader mocked the technology at a San Diego City Council meeting, breathing into the microphone as he said "the emperor is a fan of Flock" and that the cameras let him "stalk my ex-girlfriend."
NBC Bay Area reported that Palo Alto's independent police auditor is reviewing how police handle Flock data — who can access it, whether it is shared outside the department, how long it is kept and how the cameras are used.
Reactions
Flock CEO Garrett Langley is not conceding ground. "On a very personal level, I go to bed every night very proud of the impact we have in the world," he told NPR. He said the company "will have added seven times the number of new customers that have left us this year."
In a Fox News interview Saturday, Langley called for a national middle ground amid the protests and camera vandalism. "I value my privacy… but what we're talking about is safety as well," he said. "What we have to prioritize as a country is compromise: how do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?"
He took a shot at Denver's decision to sign a one-year deal with Axon after residents raised alarms about data sharing for immigration enforcement. "I guess in some ways I scratch my head because that company works with ICE," Langley told NPR. "They lack the accountability and transparency we have, and so I don't know why they made that choice." Axon holds several multimillion-dollar contracts with the Department of Homeland Security for products including body cameras and Tasers.
Axon CEO Rick Smith told investors on the company's most recent earnings call: "We're seeing a significant number of agencies want to come over to Axon and convert from existing license plate readers to us." He credited the company's "controls and privacy work." Axon declined to tell NPR how much business it has picked up from canceled Flock contracts.
"For more than 30 years, we've built products to protect life," Axon spokeswoman Kate MacKinnon said in an email to NPR. "As new technologies emerge, we know that our customers require solutions that protect data and privacy."
Police defend the tool. Palo Alto Police Chief James Reifschneider called the readers a "tremendous investigative tool" in a statement to The Independent. "It has helped us solve cases, recover stolen vehicles and property, apprehend wanted individuals, and safely locate missing and suicidal persons. I am confident that our officers are using the technology responsibly and to good effect," he said.
Opponents want the contracts gone, period. "We need to cancel these contracts," DeFlock DC member Loreal Hawk told the Washington gathering. The ACLU called Flock's new safeguards largely unsatisfying.
What's Next
Palo Alto's City Council is expected to finalize the scope of the OIR Group audit on Monday before deciding whether to change how the city uses the cameras. "We want to make sure that value isn't overridden by the lack of trust in misuse of the data," OIR Group's Michael Gennaco said in a statement to NBC.
More council votes are coming in cities weighing renewals, and Axon says agencies are still converting. Whether the fight expands beyond license plate readers to the rest of the police tech stack is the open question.
More
Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and author of "Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance," told NPR the Flock cameras "captured the public's attention" and produced a realization that "maybe we don't want to be surveilled all the time." Now, he said, Flock has "the target put on its back."
Ferguson argues the bigger privacy risk is elsewhere: integrated systems combining facial recognition, gunshot detectors, predictive policing, drones and real-time crime centers, which have drawn almost no large-scale public protest. Guariglia said Flock became the lightning rod partly because its cameras are easy to spot: "Once you know what they look like, you become aware of how ubiquitous they are."
The cameras also have defenders with results to point to. Flock was credited with helping track the suspect in last year's Brown University shooting, which killed two students and injured nine others.
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