A group of protesters shut down a New Bedford City Council meeting last week over concerns about Flock Safety’s license plate readers. And, on Tuesday, the council voted unanimously to ask for the city’s 20 Flock surveillance cameras to be removed or covered while officials determine how to regulate their use.
It comes after a recent police review of the devices found that an officer allegedly used the cameras to track her ex-girlfriend, prompting the department to suspend their use.
New Bedford is one of many communities across the commonwealth and the country fighting back against contracts with the surveillance company over fears of privacy violations and well-documented patterns of misuse.
To learn more, GBH’s Morning Edition spoke with Matt Ross, a Northeastern professor on public policy and economics and an expert on policing. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
GBH host Tori Bedford: So how are Flock cameras supposed to be used ideally by law enforcement? What are they meant to do?
Matt Ross: Flock cameras have been marketed to law enforcement agencies across the country as initially solving this problem of providing hardware at a low cost and access to a network of cameras, both within the agency and across different agencies. And the marketing materials that Flock puts out to agencies is really focused pretty exclusively on solving a small number of crimes.
So motor vehicle theft is one, unregistered motor vehicles is another, child abductions, and then extreme events like homicides and things like that, where detectives need to identify people on the scene of a particular event.
Bedford: Right. One example where we heard about this technology was December of last year. Providence police were struggling to find the suspect in the Brown University and MIT professor shootings. They then put in a tip into the Flock system and they were quickly able to locate that suspect’s vehicle.
Ross: That’s right. I think the big advantage of Flock now is the ability to really access that data. License plate readers have been around for quite a long time, but the large network of cameras — and then the ability to really crunch the data and identify the path of any individual vehicle across the road — is really the new aspect of this that’s becoming increasingly important.
Bedford: Yeah, it’s much more comprehensive. And I think you kind of hinted at the misuse, right? We’ve seen that some jurisdictions have shared people’s data with ICE, and then in Texas, allegedly accessed Flock to investigate a woman suspected of having an abortion. And we saw cases locally where officers were stalking civilians — including former romantic partners. I mean, many of them have been put on leave because of it.
Ross: That’s right. I think many police departments obviously have internal HR policies and rules about officers doing things like this. But the problem is that the software itself and access to these databases where you could track a vehicle in real time and throughout an extended period of time — basically officers could just go on and sort of access these things at their own discretion, which leads to these unintended and adverse outcomes.
Bedford: Flock has responded to the allegations of misuse. Police departments have come out and said that this [technology] does help and that it is necessary, with regulations. So Flock has announced new measures they say will clamp down on misuse, such as improved data security, cutting default data retention to seven days — I think now it’s at 30, but if you download it, you can keep it forever — and audit assistance. Do you think that’s going to be enough? What do you see for the future of Flock?
Ross: I don’t. I don’t think it’s enough. And, you know, I actually think that the evidence is still out about how useful this technology actually is.
If you go on Flock’s website and look at some of the marketing materials where it advertises itself to policing agencies, you’ll see that it really focuses on sort of a subset of three or four types of crimes. I mentioned some of them earlier, like motor vehicle theft, childhood abductions. Some of these are quite severe — and of course we’d like to give police agencies better access to be able to track people in emergency situations, like the case of the Brown shooter.
But some of these other crimes that Flock advertises for — motor vehicle theft, for instance — they have quite low clearance rates. And part of that is because they’re difficult to solve. But part of that is because I think we — as a society — feel that: they’re not violent crimes, and they’re ones that we have decided not to put a ton of policing resources in. So in terms of cost-benefit, I think we need to be thinking about whether these things are actually worth some of our civil liberties in the commonwealth to solve crimes that traditionally are not violent crimes and that we haven’t really focused on, from a public safety perspective.
Bedford: Right. I think the efficacy is really important, because there have also been cases where people were falsely accused of crimes that they did not commit.
Ross: I think that’s right. And I mean, the other thing I think I’d like to highlight is that we’ve had a really robust debate in the commonwealth about the efficacy of things like speed cameras and automated traffic enforcement.
Now roadway safety, in particular, is the leading cause of death that is preventable in the United States. And it kills countless people throughout the country every year, and there is an actual strong upside benefit. There have been studies that have shown that automated traffic enforcement actually does deter speeding and prevents roadway accidents. And in the commonwealth, we’ve taken a look at that technology and decided — from a public policy perspective — that if we eventually roll it out, we want strong limitations on it and that we have concerns about civil liberties.
And meanwhile, this technology, which in my mind is much more concerning about its use by law enforcement agencies, and — even by the company’s own marketing materials — has a much smaller benefit than things like automated enforcement. And this has somehow gotten into the commonwealth and been adopted by dozens of policing agencies across the state.
And policymakers have hardly noticed until, all of a sudden, it’s almost ubiquitous.
Bedford: If lawmakers are listening to their constituents, can they navigate this so that they could maybe rein in Flock without having to abandon the technology entirely? Or do you see that as just not a fight worth having?
Ross: In other states across the country, I think it’s probably quite an uphill battle. But in Massachusetts, where the Legislature have been strong protectors of civil rights and we’ve been a lot more skeptical about technologies like these, I think that is probably the best route. Getting either some protections put in place, or the cameras outright banned in the commonwealth.
