- Grass Valley police ended its contract with Flock and removed its cameras
- They later found that Flock had reinstalled the devices
- This was allegedly due to one of Flock’s automated systems
Flock is not exactly the most popular company in the world right now, with its automated license plate recognition (ALPR) devices attracting protests, vandalism and canceled contracts with cities across the US. And it’s managed to invite even more negative headlines thanks to its reaction after one city had had enough of its cameras.
According to Fox40, the police force of Grass Valley, California, decided to end its contract with Flock and remove all of the company’s cameras in mid-August. Yet the authorities have since discovered that Flock took it upon itself to reinstall many of the cameras in the following weeks.
Grass Valley Police Chief Alexander Gammelgard had previously written a public letter to the town’s community explaining that the force’s contract with Flock had been canceled due to data privacy concerns, claiming that “Hundreds of thousands of California agency queries were being performed against our data.”
Despite the police’s actions, the force subsequently found that Flock had reinstalled and serviced some of the devices without permission from the city or the police force.
For its part, Flock told Fox40 that it reinstated the cameras because Grass Valley authorities had removed them before the cancelation process had been completed. This triggered Flock’s “automated maintenance system” to create work orders and send repair crews to put the cameras back in place. But whatever the cause, it’s not a good look for Flock.
Switching to Axon
The Grass Valley controversy is not the only piece of bad news to have hit Flock recently. As pressure mounts on local governments to shelf the contentious cameras, they are apparently increasingly turning to rival products that might generate less negative news coverage.
One such beneficiary of Flock’s woes is Axon, whose devices are allegedly being deployed around the US. A report from 404 Media notes that cities from California to New York State have opted for Axon products over those from Flock, with some stating that they made the move because Axon met their public safety requirements while also protecting user privacy
While that might help these authorities avoid some of the storm surrounding Flock, it evidently does not mean that they are moving away from ALPR technology altogether — which itself has become a lightning rod for opposition, whether it involves Flock or not.
As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put it, “Simply replacing Flock surveillance with another company’s surveillance won’t necessarily solve any of the privacy and other civil liberties problems posed by this mass surveillance technology.” Time will tell what sort of reaction the switch to Axon will therefore create among members of the public.
