Flock Safety’s aggressive expansion into the law enforcement market has been coupled with nearly constant negative coverage of its tech and its practices. Multiple cities have paused or cancelled their agreements with Flock following public outcry over the surveillance tech.
Flock’s willingness to allow law enforcement agencies to search a nationwide network of cameras has generated plenty of negative headlines of their own, including the fact that Texas cops were using Flock to track someone (possibly) seeking an abortion after she’d already left the state.
Flock’s statements in its defense are, well, super-defensive. It claims it can’t control what cops do with its tech. That’s somewhat true, but it’s also true that Flock has made zero effort to limit abusive access until it’s been forced to by its government customers or outside pressure.
Flock also claims its tech has contributed to investigations and reducing crime. This is probably true but it doesn’t mean all that much when pretty much any extensive surveillance network is going to generate some additional arrests. It’s the trade-off that’s the problem and Flock doesn’t seem to care at all about the millions of people subjected to its surveillance. Martial law would likely lower crime rates, but that’s not a an acceptable justification for martial law.
The problem with ALPR tech being ubiquitous is that it isn’t really making police work better or smarter. Instead, it just seems to be allowing cops to be wrong faster and at scale. And police officials who love this tech will always remind us that there’s a price to be paid to live in a safe society. What they never admit is that they keep changing the price tag with each new rollout of surveillance tech.
Flock’s contribution to the problem means it’s just going to keep making headlines. And while Flock may not be a direct contributor to what’s discussed here, these things wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Flock.
First, there’s this story, which involves automotive journalist Joel Felder and the Range Rover he was test driving. His loaner from Range Rover kept getting flagged by Flock as stolen. That Felder is alive to tell his story is more due to his race and location than the so-called police work that resulted in him being ambushed by Minneapolis cops in mall parking lot.
On an otherwise normal Sunday afternoon in late June, I’d decided to take the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing that week out to run some errands with my wife. Little did I know that choice would complete a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement that led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl’s parking lot in suburban Minnesota.
After dropping off our Amazon returns, we’d just gotten back in the Range Rover and reversed maybe two feet out of the spot when four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting. It’s a situation that can quickly and frequently turn bad, so as unprepared as I was, I followed their orders, got out with my hands up, and tried to figure out what the hell was happening.
It turns out cops in the area had been tracking the Range Rover for days, following alerts from Flock. But they kept losing the trail when Felder returned home. When he passed a Flock camera near his stop, Plymouth, MN police showed up to accost him.
The main problem was something either Flock or the PD could have taken a closer look at. The Range Rover loaner had New Jersey plates. And on NJ plates, two digits are printed smaller than the rest of them.
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
Which means this is also a nationwide problem, on top of being a specifically New Jersey problem. The automated plate readers are reading these plates wrong, meaning any plate starting with 34 and ending with DTM would automatically be flagged as stolen. Who knows how bad that’s going in New Jersey (we’ll wait for those headlines to roll in!), but it’s already a bit of problem in Minnesota, and not just for this particular The Drive contributor.
In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
And just to let you know how the cop problem possibly outweighs the Flock problem, I’ll let these Plymouth (a suburb of Minneapolis) cops speak for themselves:
“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
Cool cool cool.
No doubt this also kept the gun-play to a minimum, according to the Plymouth PD report:
“I observed the driver, who was a white male wearing shorts and a green shirt, as he was putting something in the back seat of the car. I could also see a white female getting into the front passenger seat…”
But Flock’s contribution to public danger isn’t limited to stolen plates. Its system also tracks vehicles of people who are suspected to have stolen something other than the vehicle they’re riding in. Here’s what happened to an unlucky Colorado resident who found herself on the wrong side of this surveillance tech:
Chrisanna Elser got a summons from Columbine Valley police accusing her of stealing a package. The evidence? A license-plate-reader camera that placed her truck near the scene. The problem? She wasn’t there. According to Denverite, Elser had to dig up her own timestamped truck video and a neighbor’s doorbell camera footage to prove it. Nobody verified the camera’s implication before the summons landed. The camera spoke, and the system listened — no further questions asked.
Elser was forced to prove her own innocence as a cop stood in her doorway. Fortunately, she had the evidence on her phone. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened? Certainly not the officer who did nothing more than convert the faulty data into a summons.
When Elser tried to get the officer to watch the time-stamped video from her truck, the officer told her he simply wasn’t interested in anything she had to show him that might prove her innocence:
On her doorstep, the officer issued a summons, without ever looking at the surveillance video Elser had.
“We can show you exactly where we were,” she told him.
“I already know where you were,” he replied.
It took Elser five weeks to get the charges dropped and it took escalating it to the Chief of Police to get it done. While the chief didn’t go so far as to apologize, he did at least let her know she did a “great job” proving her innocence, when that’s not how it’s supposed to work in the first place.
While I understand the presumption of innocence only really applies once criminal proceedings are underway, law enforcement’s reliance on unreliable tech is now forcing people to document their own movements and actions just as thoroughly as Flock tracks theirs, just in case the cops have it wrong. That’s fucked up. We shouldn’t be obligated to constantly generate a history of our movements just to get bogus criminal charges dropped, especially when we know that doing so just means providing the government with additional ways to track our movements.
When cops are boxing you in as you’re trying to leave the mall, they’re the ones who should be as absolutely sure as possible that their actions are justified. The imbalance of power between citizens and law enforcement demands better from law enforcement, but every new tech tool that cops embrace just makes it easier to make more mistakes faster. There’s nothing out there that even slightly suggests pervasive surveillance is reducing crime, but cops treat everything an algorithm spits out as gospel because it means they won’t have to think for themselves. This is unacceptable. And just because no one got arrested or killed doesn’t mean these errors are harmless.