When you drive through the intersection of Main Street and Barnstable Road in Hyannis, license plate reading cameras are logging your movements in a database that can be accessed by police departments around the country.
That's according to public records obtained by reporter Jack Styler of the Provincetown Independent.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with him recently to learn more.
Gilda Geist What are automatic license plate reading cameras and what kind of data are they collecting?
Jack Style They're cameras that read, log and store the license plates of every car that drives by them, and so they are effectively creating a log of all the traffic in that particular spot. Some automatic license plate reading cameras are on trucks or mobile, but most are stationary.
GG Where are these license plate reading cameras located in our region and how are local police departments using the data?
JS There are four license plate reading cameras on Route 28 on the south side of Cape Cod. Three of them are operated by the Barnstable Police and one of them used to be operated by the Dennis Police. There's also a camera on Route 6A in Dennis and one in downtown Hyannis. The state police have also historically operated license plate reading cameras on both the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges that record every vehicle that moves on or off Cape Cod. Police generally use these license plate reading cameras to help locate, quickly, vehicles of interest, either by looking backwards in time, or they could put that license plate that they have on a sort of hot list so that if that vehicle drives by a license plate reading camera, the police would be notified.
GG Can you tell us a little bit more about the company that makes these license plate readers that are used locally?
JS Yeah, so the company that makes the license plate readers used by the Barnstable Police and that Dennis Police also had a contract with is called Flock Safety. And Flock Safety is an Atlanta based company. They have really come on strong onto the license plate reading market in recent years. Within the last year, they also have been the subject of some controversy because reporters across the country have found that police have improperly used flock license plate reading cameras to track people who are not committing crimes, or people who have spoken out against the police, in one case in Kansas. In another case, in Kansas actually, a police chief used a Flock network to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend.
Automatic license plate reading cameras have been a technology that the police have used for decades. What makes Flock different from other license plate reading camera companies is that Flock is not just selling one automatic license plate reading camera. They're selling a network of automatic license plate reading cameras. Flock says that each user—in most cases a police department—can change the settings of how they share the data that their license plate reading cameras are collecting. But many police departments across the country, thousands really, are sharing data between each other. So that means that a police officer in Wisconsin can search a whole network across the entire country for a license plate reading camera through the Flock system. And that's what I found with this article by doing public records requests, that the Barnstable police cameras were being checked by Barnstable police officers about 220 times in November, 2025, but they were being check thousands of times per day—as many as 400,000 times in a single month—by police departments all across the country.
GG Some people you spoke to for this story say the use of these cameras amounts to "indiscriminate surveillance." How should listeners, particularly those who may feel they have nothing to hide, be thinking about the possible risks of being tracked by these cameras?
JS Well, I think that's a good question and people are going to have different opinions on this. But privacy advocates say that this really amounts to blanket surveillance, and we don't know that much about how this data is stored, where this data is going, and even where these cameras are. When I asked the state police to confirm whether or not they actually were operating cameras on the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges, they rejected my records request and said that they could not disclose the location of any cameras anywhere in the state. We know, because there was a court case, that they have historically had those cameras on the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges, and they're visible from the street. But it's interesting that the state government won't tell us where these cameras are.
