Michigan City police present plan to expand Flock Safety cameras, drones and shot detectors

Michigan City Police hosted a public workshop on June 29 to demonstrate Flock Safety tools — license‑plate readers (LPRs), Raven gunshot‑detection sensors and a proposed drone‑as‑first‑responder program — and to answer residents’ questions about privacy, data sharing and cost.

Andrew Blanchett, a Flock Safety representative, told the meeting that the company supported “over 1 million investigations” across the U.S. in 2025 and that Flock jurisdictions see higher case‑clearance rates. “Just in the last 2025, we helped also locate 10,000 missing people,” Blanchett said, citing the company’s national data and arguing the technology speeds investigations.

Assistant Chief Parks described how the systems have been used locally. He said the department’s Raven audio sensors and LPRs helped investigators in multiple recent incidents — from identifying suspected vehicles in hit‑and‑run cases to providing leads in armed‑robbery investigations — and that “since the implementation of the Flock and Raven systems” Michigan City has seen declines in some measures of violent‑incident calls. “We have seen a 20% decrease in shots fired calls from 2023 to 2025,” he said.

Presenters outlined the proposed drone program and operation. Flock and police staff said a drone configured as a first responder could reach the city’s outer ring in roughly 3½–4 minutes, work within about a four‑mile radius and operate up to FAA limits (about 200 feet). Officials pointed to South Bend’s public flight portal as a model for logging every drone flight with pilot and purpose while withholding active case details from public displays.

On data handling, Flock staff emphasized that Michigan City “owns 100%” of its images and said the vendor’s default retention period inside the Flock system is 30 days. Staff explained that agencies can download images into their evidence management systems if they need to retain them for active investigations. Blanchett described the deletion process as automated in AWS GovCloud and cited audit logs and internal alerts intended to detect unusual searches.

Officials provided preliminary budget figures. The police department currently spends about $280,000 a year on LPRs and audio sensors; adding drones and additional cameras for downtown commercial areas would increase costs by roughly $140,000, officials said, to about $420,000 annually. Presenters said funding would come from police/public‑safety budgets blended with redevelopment and riverboat funds.

Residents at the workshop praised some uses of the technology but pressed officials on privacy and downstream sharing. Questions ranged from how the system distinguishes fireworks from gunshots to whether federal agencies can obtain local images through sharing chains or subpoenas. Police and Flock staff described a three‑step permission process for interagency sharing and displayed features intended to restrict nationwide lookups by federal partners, but several residents warned that subpoena or state‑level requests might still enable broader access to archived images.

The city did not take a formal vote at the workshop. Officials said they will post the presentation and supporting materials online and continue public engagement before any procurement or policy changes.