We've been following the rise and fall of local police departments' dealings with the company Flock Safety. It makes automatic license plate reading cameras that can feed information about passing vehicles into a national database.
According to the Provincetown Independent, the Cape and Islands have been largely "de-Flocked."
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke to Jack Styler of the Provincetown Independent to learn more.
Gilda Geist Can you please remind us how many Flock cameras were in our region at the beginning of, say, the summer season; where they were and who was in charge of them?
Jack Styler Absolutely. So, there's been some changes over the past six months or so, but we reported in March that we knew of at least six Flock cameras on Cape Cod. Four of them were being operated by the Barnstable Police Department, and then there were also two Flock cameras that the Dennis Police Department had installed. Now, those cameras appeared to be capturing data still as of March, but the Dennis Police Department had canceled that contract.
GG Where in our region have Flock cameras been taken down and where are they still operating?
JS We now know that the six known cameras on Cape Cod have been deactivated or taken down. In Barnstable, earlier in September, the town council voted to cancel their contract with Flock, and the police department is now no longer able to use those cameras for their investigations. They still may be up, but there is going to be a process of taking them down. And then in Dennis, those cameras that had previously been part of a canceled contract have actually been taken down. Flock did not respond to our request for comment when we asked them exactly when those cameras were removed from Dennis, but those six cameras in Barnstable and in Dennis all now appear to be deactivated.
GG There's been a lot of backlash to Flock from members of the public across the country, but also here in our region. Many of these folks have expressed concerns about privacy and surveillance. There have also been several reports of officers using these cameras improperly, such as to track an ex-romantic partner. That was an alleged case in New Bedford. So, from what you can tell, how much did each of those things factor into the de-Flocking of the Cape and Islands?
JS Well, it's certainly been on people's minds. And because there have been so many cases that have come to light from reporters and media throughout the country—but also here in Massachusetts, as you mentioned—this has really spilled over into the conversations on Cape Cod about these cameras. Barnstable Police Chief Jean Challies said that they were not abusing this technology and that they had implemented new safeguards to make sure that the detectives and police officers within the Barnstable Police Department who had access to the Flock network were not using it for any unauthorized purposes. That's the argument that she tried to make before the town council in early September, but in the end, the councilors voted to cancel the contract nonetheless. And I think that's also because Barnstable police, we know, were using the nationwide network tools that allowed reciprocal sharing through the Flock network. That meant that other police departments from across the country were able to search inside this network that included the Barnstable cameras so that people [officers] in Arizona [or] police officers in Wisconsin were searching these cameras to try to find license plates or cars that they were looking for. Now, the Barnstable police chief said that they had turned that reciprocal sharing off, but in the end, the counselors still seem to be uncomfortable with this technology.
GG Does it seem like this is the end of automatic license plate reading cameras on the Cape and Islands?
JS Well, it certainly seems like there's been a change. In Wellfleet, we know that there's an article that will be on the fall town meeting warrant where people are making a push to ban these cameras from coming to Wellfleet. But there are some things that we still don't know about the future of these automatic license plate reading cameras on the Cape. There's several non-Flock automatic license plate reading cameras that are also on Cape. The Massachusetts State Police operates ALPR cameras on both the Bourne and Sagamore Bridges and have done so since 2015. And the number one unknown so far is whether or not we're going to get some more transparency from the state police about how they operate their cameras, where their cameras are and for what purposes they're used. We also had a ruling in Suffolk Superior Court in September where a judge ruled that the state police cannot withhold from the public the location of these cameras and the internal audits on how they're used. The state police have until November 1 to appeal that decision. Otherwise, we may soon know more about this license plate reading network that they run that's not run by Flock.
Read Jack Styler's full article in the Provincetown Independent.
