When the Flock Safety company introduced its automated license plate reader (ALPR), the cameras were sold to the public as a safety measure to aid in the search for missing persons and stolen cars, and assist police departments in apprehending alleged criminals. What the public received instead was a supercharged surveillance State wherein artificial intelligence misidentifies individuals, civil rights are ignored, and your personal information is collected and stored without your consent.
Last year, Sheriff Adam King of Johnson County, Texas, used over 83,000 Flock cameras to find what he deemed a “missing person.” When questioned as to whether the investigation was actually related to Texas’s abortion ban, King repeatedly denied it, and Flock Safety called media accounts about the supposed abortion investigation “false,” “misleading,” and “clickbait.” And yet, a sworn affidavit by the lead detective shows that the investigation was indeed an investigation in response to a report of an abortion. Reports released after the fact show the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department and Flock Safety engaged in a false narrative and continually lied to the media. The search log in the Flock system for the “missing person” showed the actual reason: “had an abortion, search for female.”
Both the Sheriff’s Office and Flock Safety attempted to downplay the search, claiming deputies were only looking for the woman to “check on her welfare” and that officers found a large amount of blood at the scene. The Sheriff’s Office’s claim that the search was in response to a medical emergency was also a lie, since the abortion occurred two weeks before deputies were called to investigate.
Sheriff Adam King cannot be reached for comment at this time, since he has been arrested and indicted on felony counts of sexual harassment, whistleblower retaliation, and aggravated perjury. When it comes to those tasked with the duty to protect and serve, King is not alone in rejecting his duty. Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala was accused of using the Flock system to stalk a romantic partner, and an Internal Affairs detective was assigned to investigate him. However, that Internal Affairs detective has now been charged with using the Flock system to surveil two people illegally. There are dozens of cases like this one, and those are just the ones we know about.
Multiple members of the Milwaukee Common Council raised concerns about how police are using Flock, writing, “when powerful surveillance systems exist without strong, enforceable audit protocols and independent oversight, the risk of abuse is not theoretical—it is foreseeable.”
There is an argument to be made regarding the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, for what Flock cameras do is not only record your license plate in a public area, but yourself as well, along with the location and time. This creates a pattern of your day-to-day life, which is then stored on a private server, accessible whenever the police feel it is necessary, with no warrant required.
With the implementation of Flock systems and the police who abuse them comes the rise of the dissidents. Local town meetings have been seeing an influx of concerned residents speaking out against the Flock system, and sometimes succeeding in getting Flock cameras removed from their streets. The Ithaca Common Council in New York recently voted to end its contract with Flock, and Tompkins County followed suit. In the instances where local politicians ignore the concerns of their residents, the true patriots emerge. Fighting for all of our Fourth Amendment rights, these folks take it upon themselves to seek out Flock cameras and destroy them, and they have been so successful at it that Flock has had to resort to hiding their cameras.
It is not a stretch to say that the ubiquity of mass surveillance will have negative consequences; we are already seeing it happen in real time. Texas, with its draconian reproductive healthcare laws, used the Flock system to search for a woman who allegedly had an abortion, even going so far as to check cameras out of state. The case in Texas was a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, and Flock is profiting from it. A Sheriff’s Department was able to trigger a nationwide search over a person’s healthcare decision by just a few keystrokes and without a warrant.
The fact that the police have this much power and no oversight while using it is terrifying. Just ask Joel Feder. Feder test-drives and reviews cars for The Drive, a website that covers vehicle reviews. Feder was test-driving a new car last month when he and his wife were surrounded by four cop cars while out shopping. After he and his wife were pulled from the vehicle, Feder asked what was going on. The car was stolen, the cops said, and they had been tracking Feder for days using Flock cameras. The cops were wrong, yet they put all their faith in the AI used by Flock and—like a kid too lazy to write an essay for a school assignment—the cops took the easy way out. If they had done a little investigating, the police would have seen that the license plate that matched the stolen car didn’t match Feder’s car, and they would have noticed the AI used in the Flock system failed to read Feder’s license plate correctly.
Feder eventually proved his innocence on his own, and the police left, but not before one of them said, “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.” Joel Feder was indeed lucky, since the police think a suspected stolen vehicle is grounds for approaching with guns drawn. If Feder were Black, he might have been killed.
Police surveillance does more harm than good, and to paraphrase Ben Franklin, giving up even the slightest semblance of liberty, to cede any ground to an ever-encroaching police state, is not worth the safety it purports to provide.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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