Despite the high praise that many law enforcement officials have for Flock Safety’s technology, a growing number of agencies across North Carolina have ended, or at the very least rolled back, their reliance on the company’s cameras.
Locally, the only whiff of retrenchment has come from the city of Graham, where police chief Brian Neil has decided to reduce the archival period for the data that his agency’s cameras collect.
“We only do it for 7 days now,” Neil went on to explain in an interview earlier this week. “We had been doing it for 30 days, but we shortened it on our own before anyone else began doing it.”
Neil contends that he settled on this week-long period because it was sufficient for criminal investigations and searches for missing people. Yet, other jurisdictions outside of Alamance County have made much more dramatic course corrections – often in response to complaints from the general public.
In May of this year, pressure from residents persuaded Pittsboro’s municipal leaders to cancel their contract with Flock Safety. Asheville’s city council did likewise in August, voting 5-to-2 to terminate their own deal with the company.
At about the same time that Asheville pulled the plug on its system, Davidson County’s commissioners ordered their sheriff to remove his 25 Flock cameras due to push back from residents over personal privacy and the potential misuse of data.
The defections seem to have accelerated this month, beginning with New Hanover County, whose board of commissioners voted 4-to-0 on September 8 to cancel the county’s contract. A day later, the Hickory suburb of Catawba ended its use of the cameras after a 60-day trial period – ostensibly out of budgetary concerns. Then, on September 10, the city of Reidsville became one of the latest communities to part ways with Flock when its police department voluntarily suspended its use of the tech.
Reidsville’s police chief Ray Gibson went on to acknowledge that he found the company’s cameras to be “a valuable asset” for his department.
“I recognize that the use of automated license plate reader technology has generated concerns within the community regarding privacy, data collection, and the appropriate use of this technology.”
– Reidsville police chief Ray Gibson
“At the same time,” he added in a brief public statement, “I recognize that the use of automated license plate reader technology has generated concerns within the community regarding privacy, data collection, and the appropriate use of this technology.”
The potential misuse of these systems has been a particularly strong motive for communities to back down from their use of automated license plate readers. In fact, there’s a number of high-profile cases where law enforcement officers have been sacked or even criminally charged because of their alleged improprieties with the devices.
Last month, a Morrisville police officer named Elizabeth Snowman was arrested after she allegedly accessed her agency’s Flock archive 31 times to look up a vehicle registered to her boyfriend’s ex-wife.
Since then, Tonya Baker, a former police officer in Wrightsville Beach was indicted for misusing her agency’s system. According to news reports, the town’s police department discovered Baker’s alleged misdeeds when it conducted a routine audit of its program.
These cases of officers who’ve been caught monkeying around with the technology have actually been a point in Flock’s favor, according to Burlington’s police chief Alan Balog.
Balog credits his own comfort with the technology to the procedural guardrails that are in place to prevent its misuse. He stressed that, in Burlington, officers must follow strict protocols when they access information from the agency’s cameras, and the department conducts regular audits to make sure the rules and procedures are followed.
“We do the auditing process each month,” he added. “It’s done by supervisors, and it’s very thorough.”
Balog recalled one month when the department’s audit found three cases where officers had failed to fully document their archival searches. He added that these innocent mistakes represented an infinitesimal share of the searches that month. But the officers who committed the errors were still raked over the coals by the top brass.
