Flock Safety tells Binghamton committee its ALPR cameras are audited, CJIS-compliant and subject to 30-day default deletion

Flock Safety public affairs manager Carl Bach told the committee that the company’s automated license plate reader cameras capture rear-vehicle images and vehicle characteristics and never perform facial recognition. "It's only used to support criminal investigations," Bach said, adding that "each search is permanently recorded in an audit log" and that data is agency-owned and "never sold."

Bach described the system as a point-in-time tool rather than a continuous tracking device and said images are stored on Amazon Web Services with strong encryption and independent audits to meet criminal-justice (CJIS) standards. He said the vendor’s default retention setting is 30 days and that images downloaded for an evidentiary investigation can be retained longer under evidentiary safeguards. "Flock automatically deletes data after 30 days by default. Once it's permanently removed, it cannot be recovered," he said.

Council members asked technical and contingency questions, including what would happen if the company failed financially. Bach responded that the agency owns the data and that data retained only as evidence would not follow the company out of service; otherwise the default deletion schedule would remove non‑evidentiary images. Flock staff also said the system logs who ran each search, the declared offense type and the time and date for auditing, and that vendor-supported public portals can be configured to show retention dates and usage metrics.