The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is reportedly ending its agreement with Flock Safety, a surveillance company that helps law enforcement track vehicles using thousands of license plate cameras installed across the United States.
A senior LAPD official told news outlets, first reported by ABC7 and the Los Angeles Timesthat the police department would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire when it expires Saturday. The department cited “serious concerns” about civil liberties and privacy. Flock’s cameras are operated by the Atlanta, Georgia-based company, not the LAPD.
“This contract is not being renewed due to serious civil liberties and civil rights concerns, particularly regarding privacy and the data collected by these cameras,” LAPD Chief Intelligence Officer Dean Gialamas was quoted as saying. “The LAPD has had to make a difficult decision, in this case to stop using Flock services until we can resolve these data, privacy, security and sharing concerns through a contractual relationship.”
An LAPD spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch over the weekend, and it’s unclear whether Flock’s cameras will continue to record if there is no active contract. According to ABC7, the police department is seeking new language in its contract to address privacy and data storage issues.
As the third largest police department in the US, the LAPD is one of Flock’s largest government customers to date. Several major US cities have also stopped working with Flock, including Mountain View, California and South Portland, Maineciting privacy concerns and concerns that federal immigration officials used the cameras to monitor people in violation of local laws governing their sanctuary city policies.
The contract expiration caught the surveillance company by “surprise,” Flock spokeswoman Holly Beilein said in an email to TechCrunch. Flock said he was confident the company could “clear up the current misunderstandings” that led to the end of the contract. Flock would not say what specific misconceptions he was referring to.
Flock has a network of at least 80,000 cameras in the US that scan license plates and allow police and federal agencies to track vehicles.
The company faced strong backlash from local communities who approved and then backed out of their agreements with Flock over privacy and surveillance concerns. Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with garbage bagseven as some communities found it Flock reinstalled cameras without permission from local authorities.
Researchers have found an increase in documented cases of motorists pulled over, detained and held at gunpoint by the police or jailed, due to false positives and errors with license plate readers. Last week, a journalist with a car reviews and news website The Drive he described how he was followed for days and later cornered by police after a Flock camera mistakenly flagged the number plate of the loan review unit he was driving as stolen.
Flock has also faced scrutiny after several security breaches exposed cameras and data, which in one case allowed independent news agency 404 Media to watch themselves live on publicly exposed Flock cameras. Lawmakers also urged federal consumer watchdogs to investigate Flock for failing to implement measures that would have prevented hackers and spies from accessing its security cameras, warning that many of its police user logins are not protected by multi-factor authentication.
404 media also reported that the US Drug Enforcement Administration used a local police officer’s password without his knowledge to track down a suspect charged with an immigration violation.
Do you know of any security or privacy issues with Flock Safety or issues with Flock cameras in your community? We would love to hear from you. From a non-working device, you can safely contact Zack Whittaker on the Signal messaging app with the username zackwhittaker.1337.
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