Several Arkansas cities pull plug on Flock cameras

Just a few years after the Atlanta-based company’s sleek, black cameras began appearing in neighborhoods around the state, there’s a rush by some communities to abandon them. Citing privacy concerns or financial and administrative factors, several Arkansas cities are joining a national wave of communities removing the cameras once touted as a needed tool for policing.

With Arkansas’ legislative session right around the corner, some lawmakers said they wouldn’t be surprised if automated license plate cameras like those sold by Flock end up being the subject of legislation next year.

At least six Arkansas cities — Centerton, Greers Ferry, Searcy, Mayflower, Farmington and Pea Ridge — have opted to either let their contracts with Flock Safety expire or end them early since the end of July. One more, Cabot, has temporarily unplugged their cameras as the city reviews whether to continue using them.

“I’m not saying I want to do away with them, I’d like to get a lot more answers,” said Republican Sen. Mark Johnson, who represents Conway and Mayflower in the Senate. Conway hasn’t stopped using its 20 Flock license plate readers, but the opposition to them there has resulted in several cameras being destroyed or vandalized.

The national Flock backlash

Dozens of cities across the U.S. have ended their use of Flock this year, according to Politico. The company faces a national, bipartisan pushback against automated license plate reader technology. Many of those opposed to the cameras view them as an unconstitutional infringement of people’s privacy. 

Other Arkansas police departments have stood by their use of the technology. Sherwood’s police department said earlier this summer that the cameras had helped them recover several stolen vehicles and locate seven missing people since it began using the cameras in 2021. Other police departments have reported similar experiences using the camera system.

Johnson said it would not surprise him if the cameras became a topic of debate or possible legislation when lawmakers convene in January. Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers.

Flock’s cameras have misread vehicle license plates and identified them as stolen, resulting in people being pulled over, sometimes at gunpoint. That happened earlier this year in Sherwood, when a Flock camera misidentified a family’s car as stolen. And the Institute for Justice, which is suing the city of Norfolk, Virginia over their Flock cameras, sent a letter to the city of Greers Ferry last year to demand it take down a camera pointed at a local couple’s driveway and yard.

The backlash also comes as communities across the country are fighting over data centers and artificial intelligence. Arkansas has been no exception.

Outside of Little Rock, Arkansas counties and cities move ahead on data center moratoriums

After asking Flock for comment Monday, the Advocate received an automated email stating the media team was “touching grass” and that, “unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7.”

‘Pervasive government surveillance’

Founded in 2017, Flock Safety’s ALPRs now form a national network of 120,000 cameras operated by police departments, homeowners associations and private businesses. The cameras take a photo of every car that passes one, which is then fed into the Flock Safety platform. 

Using artificial intelligence, the platform allows law enforcement to track past movements of vehicles that match a certain description or have a certain license plate number across jurisdictions depending on the access other departments give them to their camera data.

In Little Rock alone, Flock’s cameras have read the plates of 687,332 unique vehicles in the last 30 days.

Police departments, which can search Flock’s platform using vehicle descriptions or full or partial license plate numbers, don’t need a warrant to search the data the cameras collect.

The pushback against the cameras has spawned several crowdsourced maps of camera locations. The company’s CEO called activists behind one of those maps “terrorists,” comments he apologized for last month.

American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas spokesperson Megan Bailey said the organization was encouraged to see local officials pull the plug on the cameras, saying the “safest data is data that is never collected.”

“Driving a car should not subject anyone to pervasive government surveillance. Flock cameras do not simply capture isolated images; taken together, they can create a detailed map of a person’s life,” Bailey said. “This information can be widely shared and has been used by federal immigration authorities and other agencies without warrants.”

The technology has also been abused by some officers around the country. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that it had identified more than 50 police officers who had been fired or arrested after using the Flock camera network to stalk and harass spouses, ex-partners and others.

Flock announced last week that it would implement new guardrails for its technology by the end of 2026. The announced changes include a shorter default period of time that camera data will be retained — though that can be overruled by police departments — and requirements that searches be accompanied by a criminal case number. 

“Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable,” the company’s CEO Garrett Langley wrote on its website. He credited existing audits and monitoring built into the platform for catching law enforcement officers who were accused of misusing it.

He also urged police departments to utilize the platform’s optional public transparency portals — but didn’t require it.

Both Johnson and House Minority Leader Andrew Collins stopped short of calling for a prohibition on Flock’s use by departments. Collins, who is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said he believed local governments should remain in control of whether the technology is used.

“It’s been a local conversation, and I think that’s probably where it should remain,” Collins, a Democrat from Little Rock, said. “I’m not sure that the state should get involved in taking away the rights of local communities to have these serious conversations about balancing security and civil liberties.”

Johnson said there needed to be safeguards and guardrails on any kind of technology, including automated license plate readers. 

Arkansas has had a law regulating automatic license plate reader cameras since 2013. Former Republican Sen. Ben Gilmore sponsored changes to the law adopted last year that allow private landowners, leaseholders and businesses to own and operate automated license plate readers provided they are used for public safety or monitoring the comings and goings from private property.

Johnson said implementing more than what is already required under Arkansas’ license plate reader law could be something he would support, but it would depend on the specifics of the bill.

“I’ve had law enforcement people say to me, ‘This has been a valuable tool that we’ve used to do good things,’ and I’ve had some people say it’s a violation of privacy,” Johnson said. “And I think the truth is probably somewhere in between.”