Flock cameras: Public safety or surveillance state?

**Brian Lehrer** (0:05)
From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast.
It's Wednesday, August 12th.
We start with the increasing use of and backlash against flock cameras. Do you know about these yet? The word is flock, F-L-O-C-K like flock of seagulls. Over 40% of police departments nationwide are now partnered with the company called Flock, which provides AI powered automatic license plate readers. There are at least 120,000 flock cameras scattered across every state in the country except Alaska. We are told, and most of the data from those cameras is funneled into national databases or a national database that allows users to track a car's movement. And while police say the cameras are helping to solve crimes, critics argue that the whole system is a gross invasion of privacy. Now, if you only recently learned about flock, it's probably because of some controversial headlines. Maybe you saw in April, Wisconsin cops used flock to track a man across state lines to create a pretext to search his car for weed. Last year, Texas police tracked down a woman who had self-administered an abortion. There have also been examples of abusive cops using the technology to stalk their exes. And one of the biggest flock related news stories of the past year is not surprisingly about how ICE has been using the database to locate undocumented immigrants with the help of local law enforcement. So given these examples of alleged overreach, it's probably no surprise that people have been pushing back against the explosion of the technology. Activists are essentially arguing the cameras are calcifying an already growing surveillance state. And notably, a lot of the criticism is bipartisan. There is criticism from the right as well as the left will explain why.
And my guest on this is Jason Koebler, a founder of 404 Media, which has been covering flock and the push back against it for several years and actually broke several of the stories that I just referred to. Hi Jason, welcome back to WNYC.

**Jason Koebler** (2:23)
Hey Brian, thank you so much for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:25)
So before we get into the examples of overreach in a little more detail than in the intro and the pushback, can you give everybody a sense of flocks pitch, so to speak? How is the company selling itself to local police departments as a crime fighting tool?

**Jason Koebler** (2:41)
Yeah, the pitch more or less is flock will come to a city or town and say, we can solve your stolen vehicle problem. These cameras basically sit at intersections and they take a record of every car that drives past them, and they have this system called a hot list, meaning police can put in a license plate, and if that car is seen on the flock network, the police will get an alert that will tell them where the car was seen, at what time, and in what direction it was heading.
Flock will say, we can use this to recover stolen vehicles, we can use this to find abducted children, we can use this to find missing people. It's also become this first step in the investigative process, where if someone reports a crime, police will look up a suspect's license plate in the flock system to try to find them. The entire pitch is that these cameras are networked, meaning they are not just searching in their own city, but if the suspected criminal has gone to a neighboring town or a neighboring state, you can search the cameras there as well. And so there basically, there's this network effect where you can track people, not just in one place, but over time across state lines and across from city to city.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:00)
How does somebody's license plate get into the database?

**Jason Koebler** (4:04)
Well, if you drive past a flock camera, there is a record of it.
That doesn't mean that cops are searching for your license plate. But essentially, police can go into the flock software. Back end and type in a license plate. And they then have the option to search either just the cameras that that police department controls, or they can search different networks of the flock system that they have access to. There's a statewide network and there's a nationwide network. And so essentially, a cop can search for a given license plate, you know, whether that's reported by a witness or whether they have looked that up in a state's DMV system. And then they can essentially get like a database, like a spreadsheet of all of the places that license plate has been seen.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:55)
So is part of the story here that the flock cameras are becoming so ubiquitous that basically everybody's license plate is in the system. So if somebody wants to look up your car for whatever reason, for whatever suspicion they have, it's probably going to be there. And some local police department or this national database is going to have a record of at least one place you passed.