Auburn, Bellingham, and Douglas join growing list of Mass. towns cutting ties with Flock

Police in three more Massachusetts towns are ending their relationship with Flock Safety, as concerns about the company best known for its automated license plate reader technology continue to grow. 

Bellingham Police Chief Kenneth Fitzgerald announced Wednesday that his department will not renew its contract with Flock after it expires on Sept. 4. Fitzgerald cited concerns with “pricing and transparency” as the main factors motivating the decision. 

“Last year, Flock tried to modify some of the terms of our service and access, while the contract was still in place. That raised concerns for me about our relationship with the company,” he wrote in a release. 

In Douglas, police officials announced Monday that all Flock cameras will be immediately deactivated. 

“The Flock system has been an effective investigative tool for us and has been instrumental in helping us solve several serious crimes. However, given the divisive atmosphere surrounding its use we believe deactivating the system is the appropriate decision at this time,” Douglas police said in a brief statement. 

The Auburn Police Department said in a statement Tuesday that it had severed its relationship with Flock due to a “contractual defect.”

Flock’s network of AI-powered cameras are used by police departments and other organizations across the country. The cameras, which are powered by solar power or batteries, automatically read license plates that pass by and cross-check that information with lists of vehicles that have been involved in crimes. 

The company says that it has contracts with more than 700 law enforcement agencies in 43 states. A survey conducted by the company found that about 20 percent of solved cases in those jurisdictions utilized Flock technology. The company credits its cameras with helping to solve more than 10,000 missing persons cases a year in the U.S.

Despite some success in helping to crack some high-profile crimes, backlash is growing. Critics say Flock cameras are not as beneficial as the company claims, are ripe for misuse, and raise serious concerns about personal privacy. A popular opposition group known as DeFlock allows volunteers to enter the locations of Flock cameras they find into an open-source database. The result is an interactive map that charts the purported locations of more than 130,000 cameras nationwide. 

A statewide opposition organization, Eyes Off Massachusetts, says that there are at least 359 surveillance cameras in the state that “track the movements of vehicles and people and share the data with an unknown number of law enforcement agencies across the country.”

Groups like the ACLU say that Flock and similar companies have set up “an inherently authoritarian infrastructure” of surveillance-based information. 

A growing number of local law enforcement leaders are cutting ties with Flock in Massachusetts. Police in East Bridgewater and Grafton recently joined officials in Cambridge, Stow, Framingham, New Bedford, Lynn, Salem, Littleton, and Hopkinton in restricting Flock use or ending it altogether. 

In Bellingham, Fitzgerald mentioned concerns about Flock’s “FreeForm” technology, which allows users to search the company’s database of visual information using plain language. 

“Those features go beyond what most people would think of as a traditional license plate reader. That concerns me because I had previously told the public, based on our understanding of the system, that our Flock technology was a license plate reader only,” he wrote. “I was not aware of the broader Free Form features available through the platform, and I do not believe those features were clearly explained or identified to us.”

Fitzgerald did say that Flock had been useful in some investigations. Ending the department’s contract with Flock may make some future investigations take longer, since officers could have a more difficult time quickly identifying vehicles associated with crimes, he wrote. 

The decision to sever ties with Flock in Douglas comes after an incident last week where someone allegedly intentionally ran over a Flock camera with their vehicle. 

“The local community has made it aware that they are not in favor of the department’s Flock cameras throughout the town of Douglas,” a police report states.