The emergence of license-plate reading technology and Flock cameras have dominated headlines in recent weeks, with cities and towns across the commonwealth grappling with how to manage the nascent technology.
While they’ve been in use by departments across the state for years, opposition has been growing.
But there’s also been pressure from police and elected officials to keep the cameras in place.
In Barnstable, the issue has simmered the last several months, in meeting rooms, neighborhoods and on the streets.
Diane Riche has lived in the same Cotuit home for 32 years, but recently, she’s had a hard time driving by one spot just down the street without looking over her shoulder.
“When I first looked at it, it was just kind of like a solar ... something. The camera doesn’t jump out at you. But then you sort of realize, you’re just being watched all the time,” she told CAI during an interview with this reporter at one of four, town-owned Flock cameras. The camera was attached to a roughly ten-foot black pole, along with a small solar panel and stationed along Route 28 at the edge of the small Barnstable village
“I go by there a gazillion times a week,” she said.
Flock is the most popular company behind the emerging technology. It allows police to track when and where a vehicle passes by.
With over one-hundred thousand installed nationwide, there has been a groundswell of opposition in recent weeks and months, from Nantucket to Los Angeles, with more and more residents becoming deeply uneasy with the technology.
And it’s been passionate. Police received at least one report in Cotuit of a masked man trying to smash the camera with a two-by-four.
“I don’t think I should be tracked or monitored without a warrant,” Riche said. “It’s a huge invasion of privacy.”
After hearing from advocates like Riche and despite the request by its police department, Barnstable town council voted to cut ties with Flock in early September.
The town joins a growing list of communities across Massachusetts ditching or suspending the controversial surveillance programs.
But perhaps nowhere in Massachusetts has opposition to Flock been more contentious than in New Bedford.
In July, protestors forced the city council to suspend a meeting with shouting from the rafters.
The concerns from protestors, as well as local policymakers, are wide ranging.
Some immigration advocates worry data collected could be used by ICE agents; there are constitutional concerns as well — unlike other surveillance laws in Massachusetts, law enforcement does not need a warrant to access data collected by the cameras.
There’s also general unease about big brother.
“Flock, Drones, Facial recognition … all these things form a mosaic. And now that mosaic is violating the fourth amendment. I don’t know how this technology got out of hand in this country but we the people need to stop it now,” New Bedford city councilor Leo Choquette said at a recent council meeting.
But maybe the most problematic — there are more and more signs that the technology could be abused.
An internal New Bedford police audit found that one officer — Detective Emily Pacheco — tracked her partner with the cameras, searching the database some 600 times, first reported by the New Bedford Light. A second officer, Sergeant James Marinelli, is facing similar allegations.
And it’s not just New Bedford police – Officers in Lynn and Stowe are also under investigation for misuse.
But while objections to the technology have intensified, the cameras aren’t necessarily coming down, at least everywhere.
“This is an important tool for us and it’s an important tool that we use to keep the community safe,” Barnstable chief of Police Jean Challies said at a recent Barnstable town council meeting. “We’re a hub for the Cape. We have a hospital, we have the Steamship, we have the mall, we have the airport. There are a lot of demands on the department, so we want to be able to use the resources that are available to us and we are committed to using them safely.”
Challies and other Massachusetts police chiefs are pushing for strict limitations on the use of the cameras rather than stopping the use completely. That includes deleting any data collected within a week, conducting monthly audits, not letting anyone outside the local police department access the info, and requiring a signoff for access by an administrator.
Despite the police department’s pleas, Barnstable town council voted to cut ties with Flock, but some councilors — even some of the most fervent opponents — say a form of the program could work with limitations.
Following the September vote, town officials tell CAI they are working to end its contract with Flock.
"The Town’s Legal Department is working on terminating the Town’s relationship with the Flock Group, Inc. and having the cameras removed," Lynne Poyant, the town's director of communications wrote in a statement. "In the meantime, the Town’s Police Department has been directed to stop using the cameras."
In New Bedford, it’s up to the Mayor and Chief of Police to decide, and while the city’s Flock program has been suspended, the Mayor has pushed back on the council’s vote.
And it isn’t just police who support the use.
Back in Barnstable, this reporter met a man named Mike who allowed police to install a camera on his property.
“There are cameras everywhere in the world. You go into any parking lot, any store, any place in the world, you’re on camera.”
We’re keeping his full name out of this story because he says his staff has faced harassment from locals opposed to the technology.
For him, under the right management and limitations, police should be able to use Flock cameras to keep the community safe.
“If you’re a criminal, I wouldn’t want those up either,” he said. “But if you’re not a criminal, what are you worried about?”
But as for the counter argument from opponents to the cameras, they point to an age-old debate in the country.
As a founding member of a local Indivisible group — Diane Riche, the woman who has lived in Cotuit for three decades — she has helped organize protests for a variety of issues. Depending on who is in charge of law enforcement, and who has the surveillance technology at their fingertips, she has concerns that that definition of criminal can be manipulated. And it’s a lingering fear that she might be someone’s target.
“When the [current] administration labels [us] as domestic terrorists, that’s some really frightening stuff,” she said. “We all operate, even if a simple protest or the people not organizing protesting, there is always an element of fear just going out.”
That’s particularly heightened with state and local-government owned cameras recording when and where she goes.
