Lugging a large brown box onto a conference room table, Eugene Escobar Jr. says he does not know if this Flock camera, still in its packaging, will ever see the light of day in his town.
“It’s in the box because when we ordered a year ago, we just didn’t realize what this technology was capable of,” said Escobar, mayor of Princeton, Texas.
Princeton is one of several Texas cities that received funding through a state grant to purchase the automated license plate readers known as Flock. But over a year since Princeton’s city council voted to acquire seven new cameras — a move motivated in part by a homicide case solved using a camera — a national debate has erupted over the cameras and the right to privacy. As a result, Escobar said, Princeton’s city council has delayed the new cameras’ installation until it can review the issue further. The city is not currently operating any Flock cameras.
“You know it’s a big concern if AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ron DeSantis and [Greg] Abbott are all on the same side.”
Robinson Council Member Donnie Finn
Flock’s license plate readers work by capturing images of car plates and other vehicle information to create a searchable database that law enforcement officers and other customers can access or get alerts on. But customer access to this database — and its potential for abuse — is a concern that has transcended political lines, even in a deep-red state like Texas. According to a Flock fact sheet, the company has systems in 6,000 communities and partners with 5,000 law enforcement agencies.
“They want to make sure that their rights are protected,” Escobar said of his city’s residents.
In the central Texas town of Robinson, 140 miles away, community members from across the political spectrum packed City Council chambers last Tuesday evening over a vote to renew the city’s contract with Flock.
“You know it’s a big concern if AOC, Bernie Sanders, Ron DeSantis and [Greg] Abbott are all on the same side,” Council Member Donnie Finn said at the meeting, referring to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Vermont senator, both progressives, and to the conservative Republican governors of Florida and Texas, respectively.
Robinson unanimously voted to end the city’s contract with Flock, a decision that was met with a round of applause by those who had shown up to speak on the issue.
Amanda Murphy, a Robinson resident, was collecting signatures after the vote to press for a ban on all such cameras in the area. Expressing concern about her daughters and the potential abuse of the technology, she suggested that someone could “go in and find their information, see where they are, create a mosaic of where they’ve been and follow them, and it’s scary.”
Twelve hours later at the Robinson police station, Murphy watched as Chief Larry Adams manually deactivated Flock camera access for his department and the other law enforcement agencies it shared information with.
As for the physical devices, the police department has already requested that Flock uninstall the equipment.
Public safety vs. privacy
Like the debate over data centers, the pushback on Flock cameras is bipartisan and nationwide. But unlike with data centers, some police departments say Flock has enabled them to solve crimes more quickly, due in part to the ease of searching for vehicles using partial information.
Dallas Deputy Police Chief William Griffith told MS NOW “it’s a godsend.”
According to Griffith, Dallas PD’s network of Flock cameras have helped them catch robbery suspects, find family members who had gone missing, and solve murders. Last June, he said, a Flock camera helped his team locate a murder suspect within hours of the crime.
“Nothing takes away from the hard work the detectives do every day,” Griffith said. “It’s just a tool that we use to help us lead to the closure and the solvability of the case.”
The proliferation of Flock in 49 states is also part of its appeal, law enforcement experts point out, because crime often crosses county or state lines. However, this has also led to a growing number of cases nationally in which individuals have allegedly misused Flock data.
Law enforcement agencies in Florida, Illinois and Georgia, among others, have investigated alleged misuse of the technology by officers.
In Temple, Texas Police Chief Coy Brown told MS NOW he recently had to deal with a case of alleged misuse within his own department. According to Brown, the department had recently implemented bimonthly audits of Flock use when it noticed a potential issue.
“We get a flag,” he said. “My internal affairs unit looks into it. Says, ‘Yeah, there’s some misuse here.’”
According to Brown, the officer resigned within hours of being put on leave. The case, a department spokesperson said, was handed over to the Texas Rangers for further investigation, and the individual has not yet been publicly identified.
Brown calls cases like these and other similar allegations of misuse by law enforcement “upsetting.”
“It sets you back in the profession,” he said, adding that he can see how cases like these can erode public trust.
Flock did not respond to MS NOW’s request for comment on reports of alleged misuse and the communities that have chosen to discontinue their partnerships with the company. Last month Flock outlined a series of changes the company said go toward “strengthening privacy, accountability, and security.” These changes include reducing a 30-day data retention period to seven and implementing a “proactive lockout” when the system detects unusual behavior.
“The goal is to intervene before misuse becomes recurring or widespread,” read the company blog post that announced the changes.
‘This is all just too much’
As the midterm election closes in, political candidates have taken notice of the bipartisan backlash to license plate readers and data centers.
In late August, Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for re-election this year, ordered a stop to all state funding for Flock cameras. In a statement to MS NOW, a government spokesperson described the move as meeting a “crackdown across Texas.”
“Almost all Flock cameras in Texas are used by cities, and those cities are increasingly canceling their contracts with Flock,” Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for the governor’s office, said in part via a statement.
“To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras,” he said.
Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running against Abbott this November, says she sees the turn against Flock as a sign of a greater frustration. Hinojosa recently released a political ad associating Abbott with the expansion of license plate-reading technology in Texas. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority, a state agency whose board was appointed largely by Abbott, has spent $30 million since 2023 helping to underwrite the expansion of Flock cameras across the state, according to a report from the Texas Tribune. Abbott’s decision to freeze funding came after the Tribune raised questions.
“I think it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Hinojosa told MS NOW. “This is on top of tech billionaires who are having their way with taxpayer dollars in this state and beyond. I think that this is all just too much, and we are tired of having leaders who aren’t strong enough to say, ‘No, that is enough.’”
The post Backlash to Flock surveillance is uniting voters, even in conservative Texas appeared first on MS NOW.
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