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Flock Safety defends license‑plate network as residents press for limits and transparency
Summary
Flock Safety’s Trevor Chandler told the Tompkins County Legislature the company stores vehicle data with a default 30‑day retention, offers transparency/audit tools and claims municipalities control sharing; residents and some legislators pushed back, citing cases in Evanston, Norfolk and Illinois.
Trevor Chandler, a Flock Safety representative, delivered a roughly 10‑minute presentation to the Tompkins County Legislature and then fielded sustained questions from legislators about data ownership, aggregation for machine learning, cross‑jurisdiction queries and safeguards for sensitive searches.
“Flock cameras identify vehicles. They do not identify people,” Chandler said, stressing that license plates are public records and that the company offers a default 30‑day automatic deletion and audit logs to support accountability. He also described an anonymization process for images used in machine‑learning model training and said the county “owns 100% of the data” and decides whether to enable nationwide or state lookup features.
Members of the public and several legislators pushed back during the public comment period and during Q&A. Commenters cited incidents in other jurisdictions — including claims that Flock technicians reinstalled cameras in Evanston after removal and court cases in Norfolk and Illinois — and urged the county to block the contract or to adopt strict policy limits following ACLU guidance. One public commenter asked, “How is Flock going to prevent officers from running searches while ICE agents look over their shoulder?”
Legislators pressed the company on technical and contractual points: whether aggregated images used for machine learning can be reidentified; whether access can be restricted so that searches for immigration or reproductive‑health reasons are blocked; how audit alerts are triggered; and whether outside agencies can download and retain footage collected in Tompkins County. Chandler said Flock has filters and auditing tools, and that the contract requires Flock to notify the customer if it receives a subpoena for the data.
The presentation and Q&A did not resolve all concerns. Several legislators said they want tighter, local controls and regular public reporting; others said the tools have demonstrable law‑enforcement value in solving missing‑person and violent‑crime cases. The debate fed into a later vote to accept a statewide GIVE grant that includes funding for the county’s Flock deployment.
