Whether magicians, thieves, or just fed up citizens, somebody has made an entire city’s worth of ALPRs vanish in the night.
According to new reporting by MPR News, police in the city of Winona, Minnesota are incensed after their entire fleet of Flock license plate readers went missing.
In a press release shared on Facebook, the Winona Police Department groused that “all eight of our city’s Flock cameras were missing.”
The police department’s first clue came on the night of August 1st, when an eagle-eyed officer “noted that there’d been no recent activity on the cameras.”
“Officers subsequently checked the various locations where the Flock cameras were placed and found that the poles were cut down near the base,” the presser explains. “Officers located the poles nearby in the weeds, but the cameras had been removed. As of [August 4th], the cameras have not been located.”
Overall, the police department noted that the cost to replace each ALPR and pole is about $3,000, meaning the city could be out roughly $24,000 if it chooses to replace the eight cameras and the poles they used to be attached to. That doesn’t include service fees from the company, however, which could add as much as $16,000 to the bill before all is said and done.
Though this case is pretty extreme, it’s just the latest incident of vandalism involving ALPRs in Minnesota — and indeed, the rest of the country.
The company and its surveillance devices have become a lightning rod for anxieties around surveillance in the US, embodying concerns about privacy, tech industry oversight, and police abuse of power all in one public gadget.
Case in point, comments under the Winona Police Department’s press release were overwhelmingly positive, celebrating the act of vandalism and making a local folk hero of whoever’s responsible.
“Whoever you’re suspecting was actually on a fishing trip with me between July 29th and August 1st,” one poster quipped. Another blamed natural forces: “I think the deer might’ve ate them. [They’re] outta hand lately.”
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