Sleepy Hollow chief defends two-year Flock license-plate reader pilot amid privacy concerns

The Sleepy Hollow police chief outlined a two-year pilot of a Flock Safety license-plate reader (LPR) system and repeatedly emphasized local control of data and built-in audit trails as he answered residents’ questions about privacy and access.

"The goal of this meeting is for me to answer any questions that come up and provide as much information as I can to kinda try and put some people's minds at ease," the chief said, opening the town-hall session and promising to post follow-up answers publicly.

The chief said Sleepy Hollow owns the images captured by the system and that recordings are uploaded to Flock’s cloud but scoped to Sleepy Hollow so other departments cannot directly view the village’s footage. He described immutable audit logs maintained by the vendor that record every search and the reason supplied by officers.

On retention, the chief said the village’s policy sets a rolling 30-day deletion for captured data and that data may be retained beyond that only when he approves and documents the need for an active investigation. "It's continuously and permanently deleted after 30 days," he said, adding that retention extensions must create an audit trail.

Residents raised concerns about sharing with federal agencies and whether local data could be used by immigration authorities. The chief noted Illinois law restricts sharing for immigration and reproductive-health purposes and said his policy will go further: "we will not share our data, period, unless there's a court order telling me to share it." He also acknowledged he cannot block a federal warrant.

The chief described practical features and limits of the cameras: they are motion-activated and designed to capture rear plates, not driver faces; they do not continuously track movements; and they can be configured with higher confidence thresholds to reduce false hits. He said the system includes a whitelist that lets residents register plates so those vehicles are ignored by Sleepy Hollow’s system (though a whitelisted plate would remain invisible to that town’s cameras even if the owner later reports a stolen vehicle while still whitelisted).

He defended Flock’s security, saying the vendor uses AES-256 encryption and reporting he found no public record of a Flock data breach. The chief also acknowledged Flock’s commercial model and that the company can market its product, but he stressed that the village controls what it shares and will require approvals for any interjurisdictional sharing.

On costs and oversight, the chief said start-up costs were largely covered by a body-camera grant and a $5-per-vehicle sticker the village adopted; that sticker yields roughly $10,000–$12,000 annually and he estimates operating costs of about $6,000–$8,000 in the program’s second year. The contract is a two-year pilot; trustees will reassess whether to continue after the term.

Residents told personal stories of burglaries and car thefts to explain why some support the system; others pressed about the possibility of misuse and about legal and technical safeguards. The chief said all law-enforcement users must be approved and trained, that searches require a stated reason and case number, and that misuse would trigger internal discipline.

The town-hall concluded with officials promising a transparency portal that will publish program rules, summary statistics (for example, number of plates read and hits), and answers to outstanding questions; officials said additional details are available through FOIA requests and at future board meetings.