As vandalism against its license plate-reading cameras and backlash against civic leaders who embrace them grows, Flock Safety is losing its surveillance coverage at a breakneck pace.
That isn’t just bad news for the company’s bottom line. It also means that its customers in law enforcement are able to draw on less and less data — making the company’s network a less attractive line item for local governments across the country.
In the town of McFarland, Wisconsin, an $18,000 contract for six Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) from Flock was scrapped after the loss of 24 county-level cameras from earlier in the year, Ars Technica reported. While growing resentment from locals probably had something to do with the decision, McFarland officials cited their home county’s decision to end its relationship with the surveillance company, which affected some 140 law enforcement agencies that had been hooked into the county’s network.
“Once Dane County [police] lost their funding for Flock, we lost about half of the potential camera network within Dane County,” McFarland police chief Brian Redman told Ars in a statement. “I had to ask, ‘were we still going to get the return on our investment with that loss?’ With the network being chipped away, that wasn’t going to be the case.”
In their announcement of the cancellation, McFarland officials said it came “in light of a shrinking database in Dane County and input from residents.”
Further cancellations across Wisconsin followed the loss of Dane County’s Flock cameras, including four in the town of Monona, and a number in the University of Wisconsin and the town of Fitchburg.
Though there are many ALPR companies in the US, Flock’s competitive advantage was the ability it offered for police to access cameras owned by other entities, like private businesses, HOAs, and other law enforcement agencies, even — and especially — across state lines.
As the domino effect in Wisconsin shows, Flock’s ALPRs are a much tougher sell when police can’t chain them together into a wide-reaching web of warrantless surveillance. In other words: it seems the more ALPRs come down, the fewer are likely to go up.
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