By SARAH RANKIN and CLAUDIA LAUER Associated Press – Local reporting by Tim Hundt
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company increasingly under scrutiny from lawmakers from both parties, civil liberties advocates and citizens across the U.S., announced Thursday that it is making changes to its platform intended to quell privacy concerns and address documented abuses of its system by some members of law enforcement.
The company operates a vast nationwide network of automated cameras that record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of all passing vehicles every day. Thousands of law enforcement agencies in 49 states can search and share Flock’s data across jurisdictions to aid their investigations.
Police have credited the technology as an important crime-fighting innovation that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in violent crimes. But some critics say its pervasiveness amounts to unconstitutional warrantless mass surveillance. Dozens of cities and agencies have nixed their relationships with Flock amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized tracking, after a flurry of examples surfaced of law enforcement officers misusing the technology for personal searches.
In Vernon County
Police departments nationwide are integrating license plate readers and artificial intelligence into their investigations, and Vernon County Sheriff Roy Torgerson said the technology is an essential tool for serious cases. In our previous reporting we found that the Vernon County Sheriff’s Office utilizes both Flock cameras and an AI feature in their Central Square records management system.
“We have a feature in our new system called link analysis, where, if we’re investigating a crime, we’re looking at a certain person, we can click one button in that system and it shows like a spider web of all the people that they’re connected to,” Torgerson said of the AI software at a recent Public Safety Committee meeting.
Regarding the Flock system, according to Sheriff Torgerson, Vernon County currently operates five cameras located in Viola, Genoa, Coon Valley, Hillsboro, and a mobile unit. Torgerson emphasized that the cameras are strictly reserved for major incidents like Amber or Silver Alerts, not minor traffic violations.
“What we really like that for is, let’s say, a missing person, we have a license plate number and there’s an Amber Alert or kidnap and we can immediately enter that plate number into our system, and as soon as that plate passes one of these cameras, we get an immediate alert,” Torgerson said.
He cited a recent success story where the system quickly located a Vernon County woman with dementia who had wandered away in her vehicle. “We got that hit right away,” Torgerson recalled. “We sent a La Crosse deputy, they found her right away”.
To protect personal information, the Sheriff’s Office relies on a digital policy system called to establish best practices and guidelines. Deputies must enter a specific investigative reason when querying the license plate database, and the system logs these searches for auditing. Torgerson said data retention for digital records, such as video footage, is tied to a 120-day standard.
“I do think that you have to have really rock solid agency policies,” Torgerson stated. “So if there is a misuse of the system that that is dealt with harshly”.
We reached out to several county officials to see if there are specific county policies in place that address the collection and storage of personal information with these systems, or in the language of the vendor contracts that provide these services. While we did not get an answer on specific policies in place currently, Vernon County Board of Supervisors Chair Lorn Goede responded to our inquiry and said he was unaware of what Flock cameras were or how they were used until we made our inquiry. Goede said he is open to a discussion about the cameras and other technologies to see if changes in county policies are needed. Goede said the county wants to make sure law enforcement has the tools needed to protect the public, but that needs to be balanced with protecting personal data and making sure guardrails are in place to protect against misuse.
Goede said he would like to see the issue discussed at either the Public Safety Committee, which oversees the Sheriff’s Office, or the General Government Committee that oversees legal affairs.
CEO says changes will drive accountability
In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said many of the product changes will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its users to implement by Jan. 1.
Among them: All law enforcement customers will have to implement an audit tool that’s intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the system detects abnormal behavior, the user would be locked out pending an internal review, the company said in a description of the changes provided ahead of Thursday’s announcement.
Flock, which says its customers own the data that the cameras record, is also shortening the standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. It said it will allow data to be preserved for longer when it is evidence tied to a case number.
Law enforcement users will now also be required to enter a code from their records management system tying each search to a specific case before it is run, something Langley said civil liberties advocates have long been calling for. Overrides for emergencies would be automatically flagged for review, the company said.
Customers will also be allowed to decide which offense types — such as homicide or arson — outside agencies can search their data for, which would allow a customer to block outside searches related to immigration enforcement, the company said.
Langley said that change will give individual cities and departments control to use the system in a manner “consistent with community values.”
Critics say updates still leave room for abuses, supporters urge balance
Critics of the company reacted skeptically to the changes, which they said appeared designed to address the growing bipartisan anger about the cameras but could still leave room for police to abuse the system.
The American Civil Liberties Union said in a blog post that the shortened evidence retention window could be “a step in the right direction,” but it characterized the other changes as “retreads” of inadequate safety measures.
Robert Frommer, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that’s led closely watched litigation over the technology, called the changes “window dressing” from a company in “panic mode.”
“This is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem, which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants,” he said.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the George Washington University Law School whose scholarship has focused on policing, big data surveillance and the Fourth Amendment, said Thursday’s shifts were “better than the opposite” but called for further scrutiny of the technology in the form of “sustained democratic engagement with the rules and judicial checks on access at a minimum.”
Ferguson said he’s been surprised to see the “growing community backlash” against Flock specifically, given that the technology isn’t new and other companies sell it as well. But Flock and the movement against it have “captured people’s sense that maybe they don’t want to be surveilled all the time,” he said.
More than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended or rejected a contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning of the year, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, a grassroots group formed to track the use of license plate reader technology and push back against it. Cameras around the country have also been vandalized.
In Congress, Republican representatives filed at least two bills aiming to restrict the use of the technology in July.
Ian Adams, an associate professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina currently working on a Flock-related research study, said many of the concerns raised about how the company’s data can be used are not new concerns in law enforcement.
“Anyone with policing experience could have reasonably foreseen that what have been termed as ‘curiosity searches’ by officers, searches for private reasons not related to police work, were going to be a problem this technology faced,” he added, noting that other technologies and platforms like the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information had faced those issues.
Law enforcement experts said it’s a common tension of “policing in a democracy” — balancing useful technology that officers say helps solve and prevent crime with the community’s interest and right to privacy.
“It’s a balancing act. A community has a legitimate interest in how information is used, but it also has a legitimate interest in the effectiveness of a police department in preventing crime,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “I think a balance can be struck, but it’s more likely to come from department policy than company changes.”
Successes and failures have captured attention
Flock, based in Atlanta, Georgia, often posts to its website what the company deems to be everyday examples of success stories for its cameras, including finding missing seniors and catching car thieves.
But the tech has also been used in high-profile cases that have garnered national attention, such as the search for a suspect in a fatal shooting at Brown University and in tracking and arresting a former North Carolina police officer who authorities say had made threats that he planned to carry out a mass shooting at a festival in Louisiana. A grand jury declined to bring charges in that case in June, and state authorities said the former officer’s family had taken him to a treatment facility out of state where he does not face further charges.
Abuses have also drawn widespread attention. The Washington Post reported earlier this month finding nearly 50 instances of police officers charged or accused of using the cameras for unauthorized purposes, many for tracking current or former romantic partners or family members.
Just this week, six employees — including four officers — of the Savannah Police Department in Georgia were fired after they were accused of searching for friends and family using the tool and allowing an officer from an outside agency to use the city’s cameras.
The Savannah department said it was made aware of the misuse through Flock’s voluntary audit function.
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Lauer reported from Philadelphia.
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