WHILE STOCKTON HAS EXPANDED its relationship with Flock Safety, California’s largest city is suspending its work with the public surveillance company amid privacy concerns.
Stockton has 120 Flock cameras mounted on streets around the city to record license plates that could lead police to stolen vehicles or suspects in other criminal cases. Police say the cameras have been effective, but residents have voiced the same fears that have arisen elsewhere — concerns that the data collected is being used for other purposes.
Until last week’s disclosure that the Los Angeles Police Department was dropping the service, it was mostly smaller municipalities that were reconsidering their contracts with Flock.
The Silicon Valley city of Mountain View ended service early this year after discovering that Flock data had been shared with federal and state law enforcement agencies in violation of its policies. So did the police department in Framingham, Massachusetts.
But in the biggest blow yet to Flock, the LAPD said it will stop using 138 of the company’s license-plate cameras across Los Angeles. The city will work on a new agreement with Flock that spells out which entity owns the data being collected, the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets reported.
Who controls the data?
The goal is to allay worries that Flock cameras can be accessed by outside agencies, especially U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in order to track immigrants.
Flock is adamant that “our customers control their own data,” and decisions on what to share, if anything, is left up to them. The company said in a statement to Stocktonia that the LAPD’s decision to suspend its use of Flock cameras came as a “surprise,” but it has every reason to believe any differences can be resolved.
“We hope to resume our successful partnership with the department soon,” the company said in its statement. “Flock has been working with LAPD to ensure that any continued use of our technology included strong privacy protections, strict auditability, clear accountability, and appropriate limits around data access.”
In Stockton, residents shared similar privacy concerns when the City Council discussed in March whether to spend $3.1 million to augment its Flock portfolio to include drones.
As Stocktonia reported, the council heard from individuals who raised privacy concerns in a city that has seen its share of ICE activity.
Alyssa Leiva, a community organizer, criticized the city’s continued investment in policing technology.
“Now we’re going to feed more money to Big Brother,” Leiva said. “Every meeting down here, you guys overplay our police budget even more and more, (while) our poverty rates are skyrocketing.”
‘Collaborating’ with ICE
Another Stockton resident addressing the council, Jarred Wright, said he did not “see the appeal of outsourcing police jobs in the service of a contractor who we know collaborates with ICE.”
“Are you going to collaborate, or are you going to stand against ICE?” Wright asked councilmembers.
Ultimately, the council voted unanimously to add six Flock drones to the Police Department after hearing the devices could be effective as the first arriving units at emergency calls. The technology can monitor more than 75% of Stockton, with police response times ranging from about 30 seconds to four minutes, councilmembers were told during the meeting.
Stockton police Chief Stanley McFadden said the Flock license-plate readers have been a boon to detectives in the city. He told the council that vehicle tracking is helping solve cases, including robberies, carjackings and other violent crime.
The technology is a “force multiplier,” McFadden said. “There’s no way a force as lean as we are can be as effective as we are if we don’t have the technology that we have.”
This story originally appeared in Stocktonia.