As more departments are adopting the technology, advocates are voicing their concern with the cameras.
“They’re not just collecting information about people who are suspected of crimes. They’re collecting information about everyone indiscriminately and that’s one of the major problems with this technology,” Kade Crockford, the Technology for Liberty program director for the ACLU of Massachusetts, said.
Flock Safety, a company based in Atlanta, Georgia, is a leading producer of this technology, leasing cameras and installing automatic license plate readers to help detect and investigate crime. The company works with nearly 100 police departments in Massachusetts, and has a presence in 40 states, according to Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin.
“We actually don’t consider our cameras to be surveillance. The reason being that surveillance implies kind of unlimited continuous monitoring,” Beilin said. “Our cameras are just not that. They’re very limited, still, cameras that are only searched for the purpose of crime solving.”
Beyond identifying vehicle license plates, Flock Safety license plate reader cameras identify vehicles by their make, color or even decals even if the vehicle doesn’t have a license plate. The technology isn’t designed to capture pedestrians, sidewalks or other areas with non-vehicle traffic. And it needs adequate cellular service in order to process and send images, said Beilin.
One Flock license plate reader camera can capture two lanes of traffic and is able to record 30,000 vehicles per day while running on solar and wireless infrastructure, according to Flock promotional material obtained by record request.
For police in Easthampton, one of several departments — including Revere, Holyoke, Quincy, Lawrence, Chicopee and West Springfield — that confirmed with MassLive that they use Flock cameras, license plate reading technology has become an important crime fighting tool.
“The entire region here has had an onslaught of incidents a lot of times in the middle of the night with like catalytic converter thefts and car burglaries and things like that,” Easthampton Police Deputy Chief Dennis Scribner said. “We can’t be everywhere at once. This gives us another means to try to solve crimes.”
Scribner said even if police officers are in the right place at the right time when they see a crime, license plate reading cameras are an important tool to minimize endangerment of others by running the license plate instead of pursuing in a car chase.
Easthampton Chief Robert Alberti said people who are concerned about Flock as a surveillance technique should view it as an investigatory tool for crime.
“Nobody’s sitting at a computer watching this thing around the clock,” Alberti said. “Listen, I don’t care who’s driving up and down Holyoke Street, right? What I care about is if you come into our community and commit a crime and victimize people, we have a tool in our toolbox to help solve crimes and to bring people to justice that are victimizing our community.”
Nevertheless, Crockford said the nature of that tool infringes on people’s privacy rights.
“If you have one piece of data about somebody, it can be incredibly revealing depending on the type of information it is but the more information that you accumulate, the more revealing that information becomes,” Crockford said.
In addition to license plate readers, Flock also sells video cameras and audio detection devices to help detect gunshots. Flock technology is in over 3,700 communities and in over 40 states and over 1500 law enforcement agencies, Beilin said.
There are other automatic license plate reader companies whose technology is in Massachusetts, including Vigilant Solutions — which was acquired by Motorola — Axon and Leonardo which have been used by some local departments, according to database Atlas of Surveillance.
Technology company Neology is also used by the Massachusetts State Police, according to a state police spokesperson. Automatic license plater reader technology can be anything from a vehicle-mounted camera to a stationary camera.
WHERE IN MASS. ARE LICENSE PLATE READERS DEPLOYED?
There’s currently no way to know for certain what roads have license plate readers stationed on them.
Flock wouldn’t provide MassLive with a list of which police departments that use their cameras. And many of the departments that MassLive contacted, that confirmed they used the technology, declined to say where they were deployed.
Revere’s department said revealing the locations of their cameras could prejudice investigative efforts, jeopardize public safety or cybersecurity, and could allow a terrorist to use the information to plan to inflict damage.
Some departments did tell MassLive where they put their cameras.
Holyoke has three Flock Falcon cameras located on Sargent Street and Walnut Street, South and Main Street and Cabot and South Canal Street.
Easthampton has two cameras, one is a Flock Safety Falcon and the other is a Flock Safety Falcon Flex, according to receipts.
One of the cameras is on Mountain Road on Route 141 and the other is in storage at the police department, not in use, Deputy Chief Scribner said. The department hasn’t purchased additional cameras in part because of its budget.
Communities MassLive contacted that confirmed they use the technology paid between $5,500 to $29,500 per year, according to receipts obtained by public records request.
Of those communities, Revere spent the most for their 15 cameras, two of which were paid for by a private company, according to Capt. Michelle Mangino. Quincy has eight cameras and West Springfield has five. Lawrence did not confirm how many cameras it has.
Each camera and associated technology is owned by Flock, not its users. It costs additional money to remove the Flock technology if the contract is terminated, email records said.
The fee is renewed on an annual basis, though Flock stipulates they are able to change their fees or applicable charges 60 days before the renewal date.
According to email records, the location of Flock cameras are determined when Flock technicians conduct a site survey to evaluate the solar or power access in the area, check the line of sight to the road and evaluate cellular service. The installation process takes typically six to eight weeks.
Popular Flock cameras include the “Falcon” camera and the “Falcon Flex” camera, the former of which is primarily a stationary camera and the latter that can be relocated and installed within minutes, according to Flock’s website. Flock’s other cameras vary, focusing on fixed, short-range license plate readers for parking lots, footage for vehicles traveling over 100 miles per hour across multiple lanes and long distances or neighborhood security.
While police departments are Flock’s largest customers, the technology is also being used by private citizens — most frequently in gated communities or neighborhoods, malls and in hospitals, according to Beilin. In these settings, individuals living in the neighborhoods are allowed to opt-out of having their license plate saved in any footage.
Beilin said private citizens often purchase the Flock cameras in order to help police departments by providing them with additional investigative evidence in the event of a crime. The license plate reader cameras don’t act like security cameras, she said.
Oftentimes, the private citizens partner with their local law enforcement agency so that if an amber alert happens, the law enforcement would be allowed access to their camera. The local police would also be able to receive an alert that a car with a license plate associated with a crime was picked up by the camera.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst announced in 2018 that it would be using license plate recognition technology to patrol larger parking lots on campus. The technology allows the school to read license plates on both sides of the vehicle and check in the university parking database whether the vehicle is permitted to park in the lot, according to the university.
A LACK OF REGULATIONS IN MASSACHUSETTS
Crockford said the ACLU has been concerned for years about how automatic license plate readers infringe upon residents’ civil rights and privacy — especially since the information the cameras are collecting is on everyone, not just those who are suspected of a crime.
Crockford also brought up concerns about how secure the information gathered by automatic license plate readers is.
Crockford’s concerns have in part also been detailed in a 2022 report by Jay Stanley published by the ACLU. Stanley wrote that Flock is building a form of “mass surveillance unlike any seen before in American life.”
Beilin said Flock is more aligned with the ACLU than they realize, focused on responsible and equitable deployment of their products, limited data retention and other related safety concerns.
Beilin said Flock doesn’t share data to third parties and customers own all of the data collected, meaning Flock can’t sell or share it. The cameras also don’t have a public unique numerical identifier, or Internet protocol address, which means they can’t be accessed remotely. The data is stored in a federal cloud database for law enforcement with high levels of encryption, Beilin said.
While Flock keeps information for 30 days, users can still download the information gathered on the camera and store it.
Crockford said there isn’t a Massachusetts law that limits how long police departments can store the information they get from the cameras or how they can share it or use it once it has been collected.
The ACLU of Massachusetts has been working on a bill, also known as H.3431, which was filed this session by Rep. William Straus D- Bristol which would limit who could use an automatic license plate reader system and how long the data from the license plate readers can be stored.
“Most people left, right, and center think yeah, it’s not appropriate for the police to just track where I’m driving all the time and be able to keep that information for as long as they want and do anything they want with it. That there ought to be some basic checks and balances and rules in place,” Crockford said.
Crockford said the ACLU of Massachusetts would prefer if the police or those who used the technology would have to delete the data collected by the cameras once it became clear the footage wasn’t related to an investigation of a serious crime. She said two days would be sufficient to determine if the footage is necessary to keep or not.
“Our position is not that we ought to ban license plate readers. Our position is that there needs to be some basic checks and balances. In the law to protect people’s civil rights while at the same time allowing police to use license plate readers to investigate crimes not to amass detailed driving records,” Crockford said.
Crockford said certain crimes, such as murders or kidnappings, don’t take a long time to be discovered and wouldn’t necessitate the police keeping the footage for an extended period of time.
DANGERS IN AUTOMATIC LICENSE PLATE READER TECHNOLOGY
While Beilin said she isn’t aware of any use-of-force issue as a result of a license plate misread while using Flock technology, other automatic license plate reader companies have had their controversies in the news.
In 2020, Massachusetts State Police ended the use of a license plate surveillance system after discovering a glitch that caused inaccurate data to be recorded for more than five years.
In 2013, the Boston police department indefinitely suspended their automatic license plater readers after inadvertently releasing more than 68,000 vehicle license plate numbers to the Boston Globe over a six-month period and raised concerns whether officers were following up on the scans, the news site reported. The accidental release showed the department failed to protect sensitive personal information which the license plate readers gathered.
In August, a Texas police department held an innocent family at gun point after mistyping the state of the car’s license plate — AZ for Arizona instead of AR for Arkansas. The police pulled the family over after finding the Arizona license plate wasn’t associated with a vehicle.
Beilin said Flock has put safeguards in place, including identifying what state each license plate is from in order to make sure police are pulling over the right car from the correct state. Beilin said Flock also encourages all law enforcement agencies and users to manually verify the plate against a database before pulling someone over.
WHO CAN ACCESS FLOCK DATA AND WHAT CAN IT BE USED FOR?
Crockford said the ACLU is also worried about who has access to the license plate reader information from Flock cameras and how that could contribute to different kinds of misuse or abuse of the system.
For instance, Crockford said, a police officer might be able to look up where his ex-wife was driving.
While the Flock database allows for a specific license plate to be searched, Beilin said every search is recorded in an indefinitely available audit report which requires users to input a search reason such as a case number.
Beilin said Flock cameras also don’t provide any facial recognition and are limited in their capabilities, more so than what a security camera might be able to provide.
At the same time, Beilin said it isn’t up to Flock to determine who gets access to the information picked up by the cameras. In certain cases, the board president of the neighborhood association could be the one with access and in other cases it could be the detective bureau in a police department.
Without statewide regulations in place determining who can access Flock footage and how long it can be stored for, Crockford said there is a potential for some police officers to share information with other parties, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or with other states who might be criminalizing abortion.
In Easthampton, Alberti said the department created regulations for their license plate reading cameras, only allowing the department to keep the information for 30 days and not sharing it with any agencies across the state or the country.
He said the department decided to create those regulations because they are only concerned about crime in Easthampton and members in their community being victimized. It was also important to create privacy regulations after listening to the community concerns shared by leaders and city government, said Scribner, Easthampton’s deputy chief.
Although Alberti said their police department doesn’t give information to other departments, he questioned how police departments in other states might know about their Flock camera and ask for their license plate information.
“Somebody goes to Massachusetts, has an abortion and goes back to Texas, right? How would the sheriff’s office in Texas know that somebody came to Massachusetts and know to come to Easthampton and ask for the Flock camera footage? Does that make any sense to you?” Alberti said.
According to an article published by the Sacramento Bee in June, the Sacramento police department sheriff shared license plate reader data with law enforcement agencies in states such as Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas which have passed laws restricting abortion access.
A report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that 71 law enforcement agencies in 22 California counties were illegally sharing location data with police in anti-abortion states.
The ACLU of Northern California found that over 80 local law enforcement agencies from over a dozen states agreed to share license plate location information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Beilin said it isn’t up to Flock to determine what laws are enforced.
“We don’t take a stance on particular laws, we expect that law enforcement will enforce the laws that they’re democratically obligated to enforce,” Beilin said. “That being said, any agency can choose to share or not share their data with any other agency. So that’s an additional safeguard we’ve put in place.”
©2023 Advance Local Media LLC, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
