Across the nation, people are protesting, destroying, and otherwise trying to thwart Flock cameras and other automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
The cameras have been sprayed, smeared, and smashed. Supporting poles were cut with an electric saw in upstate New York and rammed with a truck in Idaho. And in the Sunshine State – because, of course, this story includes a Florida Man — a resident has been protesting the cameras by sitting in a chair while holding a sign reading “DOWN With Flock Cameras” on a 14-foot pole so he can block the ALPR’s field of view.
Protestors have also shown up at local government meetings to voice objections to the cameras. Their concerns include data access oversight, profiling and other abuses by officers, ongoing civil suits challenging the constitutionality of these cameras, and broader and more philosophical concerns about government surveillance in general. Notably, these issues don’t always map neatly onto Democratic or Republican positions; there are certainly conservative and liberal takes on the topic but, in many cases, the pushback has been more populist than partisan.
On Monday, DeFlock ILM — part of a nationwide, open-source project to map and protest ALPRs — is hosting a rally ahead of the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners meeting and is soliciting speakers to voice their concerns during the public comment period.
The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office has a roughly $220,000 two-year contract for 20 Flock cameras (one of which was apparently stolen), in addition to 16 other cameras. Carolina Beach and Kure Beach both have several ALPRs and, according to crowd-sourced tracking sites, there are several dozen private cameras in the county as well. The Wilmington Police Department doesn’t operate its own Flock cameras, but — like other agencies — can access the network.
Over the last month, WECT has been digging into the issue, leading to a public statement from Sheriff Ed McMahon (although not a proper interview: when a reporter asked him why he wouldn’t answer follow-up questions, McMahon “took off his microphone and returned to his office.”)
County Chairwoman LeAnn Pierce took to Facebook a couple of weeks ago to ask for the public’s thoughts on the program. She wrote that she had concerns and wanted answers to “critical questions” before she would support any future funding. Other commissioners also voiced concerns. Democrat Rob Zapple told WECT his “eyebrows are raised,” and Republican Dane Scalise said the issues with Flock are part of the foundational American debate between safety and liberty — which I think is a helpful framing, for reasons I’ll get into a minute.
New Hanover County is far from alone. There’s also been bipartisan criticism of Flock in Congress and several state legislatures, and a host of proposed legislation to block, restrict, or regulate ALPRs. Currently, there are no specific federal laws on ALPRs, though Congress has a webpage dedicated to the issue. Dozens of local governments have cancelled their contracts with Flock or removed cameras (including that other Wilmington, in Delaware).
These efforts led Flock to announce a set of policy updates this week, which were swiftly and roundly rejected by civil liberties groups. The Institute for Justice, a Libertarian law firm that has focused heavily on ALPRs, called the changes “window dressing.” The ACLU issued a blunt statement saying that despite the updates, “Flock’s creepy cameras remain [a] major civil liberties threat,” and dismissed the new policies point by point. I suspect many residents will also remain concerned about Flock.
I think that has a lot to do with both the specifics of how Flock has been used, and abused, and also the bigger picture of mass surveillance. (John Oliver detailed the landscape in his inimitable style on Last Week Tonight earlier this month; even if you’re not a fan of his progressive-left framing, it’s a helpful overview.)
What could go wrong?
As the name implies, ALPRs are cameras, usually mounted on a pole (sometimes with a solar power panel), but also on buildings, overpasses, etc. The devices continuously scan for license tags, but they can also be paired with artificial intelligence software that records the make, model, type, color, and even distinctive features — like custom modifications, dents and dings, spare tires, etc. (The website 'Have I Been Flocked?' allows you to search publicly requested records to see if your license plate has been queried.)
While many cameras are privately owned, including by thousands of businesses and homeowners associations, they frequently have data-sharing agreements with law enforcement, and that data collectively amounts to a nationwide vehicle surveillance system, recording billions of images a month. Law enforcement agencies from around the country can tap into the database, without getting a warrant or demonstrating probable cause.
The extraordinary reach of the Flock network, along with other similar surveillance systems, gives law enforcement self-explanatory advantages in solving crimes. Like many other agencies using Flock, NHCSO cites a number of recent “success stories,” an implicit rebuff to criticism.
Earlier this year, I wrote about ALPRs in response to a letter to the editor praising their ability to help solve difficult criminal cases — specifically, the tragic and senseless 2022 murder of Alexandra Faith Gillikin in Wilmington. I think it’s worth repeating what I said then: yes, police departments are sometimes eager to get their hands on shiny new toys, and wantonly disinterested in civil rights — those are fair criticisms. But, at the same time, if you understand the process of investigating a kidnapping or a murder, or have seen the agonizing stagnation of a cold case, then you know what a technological breakthrough can mean for victims and their families.
Some have also argued that this type of surveillance has, or will have, a strong deterrence effect — although the evidence is far from conclusive right now. But, by the same token, the sweeping power of ALPR networks has inspired a range of deep concerns.
At the most basic level, the technology can fail. AI can hallucinate, cameras can misrecord plate numbers, and so on. The same kind of glitch that once sent me an E-ZPass bill for a white minivan crossing the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City while my blue Volkswagen was here in Wilmington can have far darker outcomes.
NHCSO’s policy is to confirm any ALPR ‘hit’ with the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI — which is good, insofar as deputies follow policy. But there is a growing litany of stories of mistaken arrests, often exacerbated by police officers’ faith in ALPRs.
In 2020, police in Colorado removed a woman and her family, including her 6-year-old daughter, from their SUV at gunpoint after mistaking the vehicle for a stolen motorcycle with the same plate number but from a different state; the family won a $1.9-million settlement in 2024. And just this week, a Wisconsin woman was arrested — at gunpoint, twice — because the Milwaukee Police Department failed to remove an apparently erroneous alert from the Flock system.
It’s not lost on some critics that, in both cases, the innocent women involved were Black. A recent study looking at Hampton Roads, Virginia, found that ALPRs are used more in minority and low-income neighborhoods. It would not be surprising to find that data replicated in other cities. So, if you’re concerned about the overpolicing of these communities, it seems unlikely to me that Flock will ameliorate the issue.
Still, Flock explicitly argues that its technology helps reduce bias by focusing only on crime-linked vehicles, not people. NHCSO also notes on its ‘Flock transparency portal’ that the cameras detect plates and vehicles, not “facial recognition, gender, race.”
But a recent story from Rhode Island challenges that kind of assertion. In June, a woman filed suit against the Town of Cumberland, claiming she was falsely arrested after she — not her car, but her personally — was incorrectly identified in a Flock photo. The ACLU got involved, noting that “contrary to routine police claims that the ALPRs only take photos of license plates, in this case, the camera was also capable of taking pictures of drivers and passengers.” In a statement, the ACLU wrote, “this technology can do more than ‘just record license plates,’ and the secrecy surrounding its more invasive uses deserves special condemnation.”
There is also a growing number of cases where law enforcement officers have abused Flock to stalk and harass people, including former domestic partners. The technology works as intended, but it’s put to reprehensible use.
Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported at least 50 officers have misused the technology. The Institute for Justice maintains a database of ALPR abuse, with a map of over 100 incidents, including, “in Florida, a woman was stalked and pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy who saw her at a TV shoot,” “in Texas, a sheriff’s deputy used 83,000 Flock ALPRs to find a woman who had allegedly had a medication abortion, at the behest of her abusive partner,” and “in Georgia, a police chief tracked his ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times.”
The IJ notes, “although this is the most comprehensive list publicly available, it may be just the tip of the iceberg. Officers rarely enter specific reasons when they search ALPR databases, and the volume of searches is so large that it would be impossible to figure out whether officers’ vague justifications are actually true.”
Some of Flock’s recent policy updates are aimed at curbing this type of abuse. The company is now recommending limiting data retention to just a week (down from 30 days). The argument, as I understand it, is that after a crime is committed, police still have a reasonable amount of time to file requests, but there’s a shorter window for data to be misused. This week, the company’s CEO admitted that it took him too long to respond to the problem. Many critics, including the IJ and ACLU, don’t think it’s enough.
To be fair, officers don’t need advanced, AI-powered surveillance tech to prey on people. Just recently, NHCSO fired a deputy after the SBI began investigating him for sexual harassment; the deputy used little more than a cell phone. Law enforcement can and should do more to screen out bad actors, but it seems difficult to promise there will never be officers who act in repugnant and illegal ways. The question, which is not abstract, is how much more damage could they do with access to Flock — and what can be done to prevent that? Some departments have limited access to ALPR databases; others, I’m told, are considering heightened internal controls. States could also pass legislation making the abuse of ALPR a specific crime with enhanced penalties.
It’s also, in my editorial opinion, reasonable to be concerned that ALPRs could be abused far beyond the admittedly horrifying cases of domestic violence and sexual harassment. I’ve heard concerns, mostly from the left, about ICE and other federal agencies' ability to use Flock to track immigrants, minorities, activists, and women seeking abortions or other reproductive care. But I’ve also heard concerns from the right about abuses targeting gun owners, free speech advocates, and those skeptical of vaccines or other public health policies. Whatever you think of those individual reasons, it’s worth considering the broader implications and thinking beyond just local law enforcement.
Another concern with the tech itself is data security and transparency.
Flock is, after all, an $8-billion private company — which creates a different set of concerns than state surveillance. Law enforcement agencies and Flock have both strenuously stated that the database created by ALPRs is safe. When it comes to the private owners of cameras, the company is adamant that “Flock does not sell your data, and no outside agency can view your information unless you choose to share it.”
That’s not the case with all ALPR companies. According to the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, Vigilant Solutions, a subsidiary of Motorola, works through a sister company which “offers access to data it has privately collected through partnerships with repossession companies, who passively collect ALPR through their own vehicles.”
Even if you take Flock at their word, it's clear there are incentives to sell ALPR data, perhaps in anonymized ways aimed at skirting privacy concerns, to insurance companies, auto manufacturers, fast food chains, and anyone else who might benefit from knowing where everyone is going on a daily basis. We’ve seen many tech companies behave irresponsibly, unethically, or illegally when it comes to the alluring profit possibilities of that kind of data. Bare minimum, it's a concern to keep an eye on.
And of course, data can be stolen as well as bought. In 2019, a data breach at Homeland Security exposed over 180,000 images of travelers captured by Perceptics, a subcontractor working for Customs and Border Protection. Perceptics reportedly provided ALPR services but also ran a biometric facial recognition pilot. According to a report from Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, CBP “did not adequately safeguard sensitive data.” The report attributed the data breach to violations of safety protocols by the subcontractor, but acknowledged the “incident may damage the public’s trust in the Government’s ability to safeguard biometric data.”
Lastly, when it comes to the technology itself, there’s a considerable lack of transparency. It can be unclear which agencies, let alone which individuals, are accessing any given Flock network. As StarNews reported this week, only about 4% of searches on NHCSO’s network originated from within the Sheriff’s Office. The rest? Redacted by the county, citing “state law and custodial priority.”
The many faces of mass surveillance
There are also broader concerns that don’t necessarily hinge on any specific technology or policies around ALPRs. Just the idea of continuous surveillance, on a massive scale, regardless of what police do with the information, is a bone of contention for many — including two residents of Norfolk, Virginia, who sued in federal court in 2024. They argued the city’s installation of nearly 200 Flock cameras amounted to a perpetual warrantless search, a violation of the 4th Amendment. In January, the Eastern District of Virginia court found in favor of the city. The case is now being appealed in the 4th Circuit (which covers federal courts in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas). The plaintiff’s case has resonated with libertarian groups, kicking off the IJ’s crusade against ALPRs, and inspiring the Cato Institute to write an amicus brief. Cato, in particular, addressed not just current use but potential future implications.
In an apologia for Flock in The Atlantic, Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, defended ALPRs from what he considered a ‘populist panic,’ but still acknowledged potential constitutional issues.
“Although a single photo of a moving car is not a major intrusion, a database full of billions of such photos might be. Such ‘mosaic’ surveillance—so named because many small police actions can add up over time to what counts as a ‘search’ in constitutional law—has faced increasing scrutiny from the Supreme Court over the past decade,” he wrote. “A single ALPR photo isn’t a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on ‘unreasonable search and seizure,’ but the Court has recently found queries of similarly detailed data sets to be a search that requires a court-issued warrant to conduct. “
It’s unclear how, or if, the Supreme Court would rule on a case involving Flock. But it may be that opponents will need to pass new laws, rather than just relying on the 4th Amendment. I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I think I can see how the rapidly evolving technology — both ALPR and AI — could slip the grasp of 18th-century law. As I’ve written elsewhere, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are wonderful documents, but they’re not perfect. The founders were forward-thinking, but not clairvoyant. The 4th Amendment contemplated Flock about as much as the 1st contemplated Facebook (or the 2nd an AR-15).
Again, it seems important to situate Flock and ALPRs in the broader set of surveillance methods and the debate that, as Commissioner Scalise put it, “we’ve been dealing with as Americans since our founding: How much do we want to trade off for safety and security, versus our liberties?”
I’ve repeatedly seen people shrug off that idea, offering some blithe variation of ‘if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.’ I’ll admit, the flippancy of that frustrates me a bit, and I’m always a little pleased when I see Franklin’s famous quote used as a rejoinder: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Here in Wilmington, I’ve followed a lot of different warrantless surveillance systems. Back in 2014, WECT was covering the so-called Stingray, a controversial device that simulated cell towers and could intercept cell phone calls and data. Nationwide, law enforcement was extremely secretive about the use of the devices and, in some cases, essentially lied about information they gathered, telling judges it came from a “confidential source” rather than a cell tower simulator.
Warrantless use of Stingrays and other cellphone trackers has since been pretty broadly struck down as unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment. A 2017 briefing on the Brooklyn Supreme Court ruling against the NYPD’s use of Stingrays, from the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, highlighted many concerns that seem rather relevant today, including the need for law enforcement to “publicly disclose the acquisition of new surveillance technology, provide a broad description of how the technology works, and outline the policy regulating its use.”
According to reporting from Port City Daily in 2024, the Wilmington Police Department stopped using Stingrays, but NHCSO may still be utilizing them (a spokesperson would not confirm or deny it).
Then there’s ShotSpotter, a network of audio monitoring devices placed around cities — including Wilmington — designed to detect gunshots. SoundThinking, the $120-million company that produces the devices, claims emphatically that “ShotSpotter does not and will not listen for the sounds of human voices.” But the network does create audio recordings which can be listened to, so that officers can hear how many rounds are fired, and even potentially identify what type of weapon is being used. In my conversations with critics of surveillance and overpolicing, I’ve heard some skepticism that ShotSpotter wouldn’t be used to eavesdrop — or, at the very least, that it couldn’t be used that way in the future.
Concerns about ShotSpotter, including from the ACLU, have focused less on the constitutionality of the listening network, and more on where those devices are placed and what police do when an alert is signalled. ShotSpotter has seen mixed results in court. This year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the use of ShotSpotter as a tool to “help” make arrests, but “sidestepped whether the controversial gunshot detection system alone can establish probable cause, despite ongoing concerns about the technology’s accuracy, secrecy and oversight,” according to the Tribune-Review. Last year, Chicago, which had already cancelled its contract with ShotSpotter, settled a lawsuit and agreed that the technology “does not give police justification to stop or pat down a person who happens to be near the location of an alert,” according to the MacArthur Justice Center.
And, of course, there’s the STING center, Wilmington’s real-time ‘situational awareness’ hub, which gathers an array of video and other information. Historically, the police department has been guarded about the full capabilities of the center, although it states online that all information is gathered in a “lawful manner.” In early 2020, while working at Port City Daily, I was able to get my hands on STING center footage while working to clear up a mass towing of vehicles parked on downtown streets. The videos were hardly futuristic — they were fairly grainy and constricted to certain shots. It wasn’t quite a panopticon — but that was also six years ago.
I’ll note, I’ve heard the STING center has helped solve several downtown crimes, which I think people would generally feel good about. At the same time, I’m not sure how many people are aware just how acutely they’re being surveilled when they’re strolling down Front Street.
All of these surveillance methods are based on similar arguments about the need for public safety. And, in each case, we trade away some measure of privacy in the bargain. Where you draw the line might be a matter of constitutional interpretation, your faith in law enforcement to ethically deploy powerful technology, or something more nebulous — a vibe, a sense, a gut reaction. I’ve spoken with some people who have little or no issues with the surveillance tools above, but when it comes to Flock, they just feel a certain kind of way.
How do we feel about all this?
Speaking of feeling, part of this story is about the cognitive dissonance between how people feel about privacy and how we actually act when it comes to data security and surveillance.
Polling has consistently shown that Americans and Europeans are concerned about government data collection and have very low confidence that social media and tech companies will be good stewards of private information (banks and healthcare companies, meanwhile, garner a bit more faith).
Our popular culture certainly bears that out: there’s a nigh-endless list of novels, movies, and songs expressing concern, fear, and anger about various forms of surveillance (including the Judas Priest song I’m riffing on for this column’s title). The one genre that seems copacetic with or even enthusiastic about surveillance technology is police procedurals — which I think is telling.
At the same time, some of that same polling shows Americans are fairly unscrupulous about privacy agreements, including a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center that found 56% of people frequently click ‘agree’ without reading the fine print (an additional 22% admitted to ‘sometimes’ blindly clicking through). Most of those same Americans also use smartphones, which are constantly generating data about myriad aspects of their behavior: where they go, whom they associate with, what they like and don’t like, and so on.
Perhaps that’s in part because, as polling also shows, many Americans feel powerless about their lack of data security. (Europeans are less despondent, perhaps because the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation treats data privacy as a human right, while American laws are a patchwork of weaker, and more easily circumvented, regulations.)
That’s all worth keeping in mind, because Americans' habituation to — and resignation towards — a lack of data privacy is sometimes thrown in their faces when they object to a particular intrusion.
That’s essentially what Lehman did in his Atlantic piece, writing, “the privacy threat here is real—but, compared with other intrusions, minimal,” adding, “Americans have, through the cameras nearly everyone carries in their pockets, voluntarily made far more invasive surveillance a regular feature of daily life. Many people may not like that, but it’s hard to see ALPRs as a major intrusion by comparison."
The argument is: You’re hemorrhaging data; what’s another papercut? As Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy told reporters in 1999 — before Facebook or the iPhone — "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
But I don’t think Americans should get over it, even if they’ve been incautious in the past, or felt defeated by Big Tech’s sprawling and underregulated reach.
Trust
All of that said, there are still good arguments for giving police state-of-the-art tools to solve crimes. Facing the family and friends of Faith Gillikin, for the parents of murdered children, the survivors of sexual violence, and — in brute economic terms — the trillions of dollars that crime costs us, we have some responsibility to give our law enforcement agencies a fighting chance.
In his statement, McMahon said, “public safety and individual privacy are not competing values,” echoing the words of Gillikin’s friend Alicia Robinson, who argued, “We do not need to choose between the safety of our neighbors and our civil liberties.”
As I wrote in the spring, I agree with that, in spirit. But it will take work, clear-eyed conversation, and vigilance.
If you’re not going to be a police abolitionist and get rid of law enforcement, or a tech absolutist and consign officers to 18th-century crimefighting tools — and I don't personally think either of those positions make much sense — you’re going to have to develop some cogent grounds to decide what’s enough power, and what’s too much. The 4th Amendment helps but, as I’ve said, it may not resolve every debate. Requiring warrants, as the courts did with Stingrays, is also an option.
Adding a whole lot more transparency to the system would also be helpful, I think. Especially if you want to make the argument that ALPRs, and surveillance writ large, will have a deterrent effect. Like many of you, I’m not a huge fan of the panopticon. Knowing that China has reduced crime through a pervasive and invasive surveillance state leaves me ambivalent, at best, and more often deeply disturbed. But if we’re arguing that there’s an appropriate amount of surveillance that makes us safer without creating a dystopian state, then it probably helps for people to know just how the tech works, and how powerful it really is.
I’ll also note that, as we’ve currently allowed our surveillance systems to evolve, they empower law enforcement and prosecutors — but not defendants, including the innocent. Regardless of the data retention window, by the time someone faces charges, it's possible most data has been overwritten or deleted. Imagine a case where prosecutors aren’t relying on ALPR data, basing their case on some other evidence instead, but the defendant could show they weren’t at the scene of the crime because they were in their car, somewhere else — if only they had access to ALPR records. Police save data that shows where their suspects were, not data that shows a defendant was somewhere else. I’m not sure, exactly, how you solve that problem, but it seems like if we’re going to have mass surveillance it ought to be able to exonerate as well as convict.
Lastly, in addition to technological safeguards and policy guidelines, there’s a matter of trust that underlines all of this. We trust law enforcement with enormous powers. They’re allowed to detain and arrest people, drive two-ton vehicles at unsafe speeds, and use lethal force, all in the name of public safety. If that type of police power is going to be allowed, we have to be able to trust law enforcement and, most of all, the people in charge.
As McMahon said in his statement, his office’s job is “protecting our community while maintaining the public’s trust.” I couldn’t agree more, though I think the public deserved a little bit more than a pre-written statement.
The debate certainly isn’t going away, and as the county commissioners — who sign the Sheriff’s paycheck — get involved, I hope we’ll have more and fuller conversations about it. I’ve tried to lay out the issues and problems in this column, but I no doubt missed concerns that some of you have today. I certainly can’t predict all the concerns of tomorrow, and next year, and the decade after. (I try to be forward-thinking, but I’m not clairvoyant.)
I’d say we need to keep an eye on it, but frankly I think it will take much more than that
