Flock Cameras in RVA

Rich Meagher:

This is RVA’s Got Issues from VPM. I’m your host, Rich Meagher. Lots of us live our lives on camera, just look at Instagram, but there may be a limit to how much we want to have our lives documented.

Vox-pop #1:

If I stand at the end of my driveway, I can see four Flock ALPRs. I cannot leave home in a vehicle without my movements being tracked.

Rich Meagher:

That’s a Richmond resident speaking at a recent city council meeting about something called an ALPR, an automated license plate reader. It’s a camera, but one that takes pictures of cars and records the plate number, the time, and the day. A company called Flock Safety is the market leader in these cameras, and they are just about everywhere in RVA. Richmond, Chesterfield, Henrico, Hanover, several hundred according to reports. Flock and the police departments that contract with them say, “This is just a tool to address crime.”

Rick Edwards:

And I can tell you as a police chief of this city that it works.

Rich Meagher:

That’s Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards, addressing concerns about Flock in that same council meeting. He pointed to specific cases where this tech helped solve crime, including a recent pair of robberies.

Rick Edwards:

This vehicle was searched by officers and the two suspects were apprehended in Southwood Apartments after a Flock ALPR alert, 33 minutes. And I can tell you that this result, we may have solved this case, but I guarantee it wasn’t in 33 minutes and it may not have been without other victims.

Rich Meagher:

So which is it? Are Flock cameras a powerful tool for getting the bad guys? Or a dangerous step towards mass surveillance? To flock or not to flock? That’s coming up on RVA’s Got Issues. Kunle Falayi is a data journalist with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO Public Media in Norfolk, and he’s been reporting on Flock safety cameras. Kunle, welcome.

Kunle Falayi:

Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Rich Meagher:

So Kunle, these cameras aren’t just coming, they’re already here.

Kunle Falayi:

Yep.

Rich Meagher:

Right? Can you describe what one of these cameras actually looks like for our listeners? What are we talking about here?

Kunle Falayi:

It’s actually difficult to miss when you drive around the street and you see something that looks strange, like a robot mounted on a pole-

Rich Meagher:

<laugh>

Kunle Falayi:

… Then it’s likely to be a flock camera.

Rich Meagher:

Okay.

Kunle Falayi:

Uh, it doesn’t look like the usual, um, surveillance cameras or the traffic cameras or the photo, uh, speed cameras.

Rich Meagher:

Right. The speed cameras in Richmond, we’ve seen those, they’re like weird garbage cans like R2D2, but these, these things you’re talking about are usually mounted up high-

Kunle Falayi:

Yes.

Rich Meagher:

… on like a pole or something.

Kunle Falayi:

Exactly. Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

And are they like a circle? Are they a box?

Kunle Falayi:

They kinda look oval.

Rich Meagher:

Mm.

Kunle Falayi:

Like if you’ve seen this, uh, movie Wall-E, when the robot folds up and it looks like an oval, that-

Rich Meagher:

Yeah.

Kunle Falayi:

… that’s, that’s what it looks like for me.

Rich Meagher:

Eve. Yeah, that’s Eve, the robot, right? That folds up. But these robots are not flying around falling in love are they?

Kunle Falayi:

No, they’re not. <laugh>

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. Um, now, you told our producer that you think your job, or one of your jobs as a journalist, right, is to try to figure out how useful these cameras are. So how’s that going?

Kunle Falayi:

Unfortunately <laugh> I haven’t got anywhere yet.

Rich Meagher:

<laugh>

Kunle Falayi:

I mean, what we’ve got so far are anecdotal evidence, which is for me as a data journalist, that’s not enough. It’s not enough for you to tell me that actually this has been really helpful in solving crimes, but I, I need to see the data. Uh, to what extent has it been used? It’s not just about, oh, we were looking for a missing person and then we searched the data and then we, we used it, but eventually we found the person. But I want to be able to determine to what extent. Was it directly the reason you found this person? Was it the direct reason you solved this crime? So our intention is at some point to be able to map out to what extent this surveillance system has been useful in law enforcement.

Rich Meagher:

So your question is, like, how do we identify that the Flock camera was the key tool that you needed and without it, this wouldn’t have happened or would have taken a lot longer or would have been a lot harder to do?

Kunle Falayi:

Absolutely. Y- you see, why we’re asking that question is not basically to say that Flock camera is a terrible technology. It’s that this tool is so powerful that you need to be able to explain exactly why it is necessary and why it is so useful that you can this countenance all these really, really big concerns about its use. Uh, Fourth Amendment rights is a thing and people are concerned about the potential violation of people’s rights.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. Let’s talk about those Fourth Amendment concerns, right? This has been the real complaint that we hear at, you know, local city council meetings that we’ve been seeing online from a lot of folks. Like, people are worried that this tool can be used, like, to track their movements, or to target innocent people, or to target political activists, or possibly undocumented folks, right? What are the actual risks here from the use of this technology?

Kunle Falayi:

I think we need to start with how it works. When it sees a vehicle, it captures data on that vehicle, the color, the make, uh, even if it has a decal on it, it captures that, it captures, of course, the license plate. And then, apart from that, it registers the location of that vehicle at that point in time, the coordinate. So what that means is that if your vehicle is captured five times, it captures the location at every point in time. When you have multiple coordinates, you can sort of map where the location of that vehicle, and that is the concern there. The concern is that this can potentially be used to surveil people. And we’ve seen cases of that. We’ve seen cases of that all over the country where it’s been used, it’s been used to track down people that are officers who have used it to track down individuals for extra legal reasons. <laugh>

Rich Meagher:

Right. Right. Yeah. So there’s this case, for example, of a Milwaukee police officer used it to track his ex, right? His, uh-

Kunle Falayi:

Exactly.

Rich Meagher:

… you know, essentially to stalk his former partner. Now, you know, the camera companies, Flock and others say, “Well, we hear about those things because we’re tracking it, right? There’s a, there’s a log. Anytime anybody uses this data-

Kunle Falayi:

Oh, the log.

Rich Meagher:

… we have a log <laugh> you’re like, oh, the log. Well, w- well, what’s so bad about that log, right? It, doesn’t that mean that we could identify any of these bad faith uses or these ab- abusive uses if we wanted to?

Kunle Falayi:

I will take the example of Virginia right now. Virginia has, despite the law right now, despite the ALPR law, it’s very difficult in Virginia right now to track down bad users of ALPR. And here is the reason. Um, last year we reported on small town, Bridgewater, that has just five cameras, and the cameras, the users of the cameras or the system or people who queried data coming from that town-

Rich Meagher:

Yeah.

Kunle Falayi:

… logged more than six million records of use, meaning that each time they conduct a query, they log why they’ve conducted a query. Now, those are five cameras. Now, imagine Richmond. Richmond has about how many, about 100 cameras. Now, how much data do you think they would generate in terms of the number of logs they would need to log? I mean, any typical town with or city with at least 100 cameras, that’s potentially millions and millions and millions of records.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. Let’s go back to that again. So you’re saying that you went to Bridgewater, right? Bridgewater, we, we know Bridgewater here in Virginia, pretty college town, right? And they have five cameras, and you’re saying that those cameras were, were accessed six million times?

Kunle Falayi:

More than six million times.

Rich Meagher:

And, and that’s not just by people in Bridgewater that’s, uh, accessed all across the country or-

Kunle Falayi:

I really don’t believe that Bridgewater itself conducted up to 50 of that. <laugh>

Rich Meagher:

Right, right.

Kunle Falayi:

That was a, that was at a point when the ALPR had not, um, banned access by, uh, outside agencies, out of state agencies. Now the law says they can’t do that. That, that’s another thing because we’ve heard according to, uh, the Virginia Crime Commission’s report in January that actually there are some out of state agencies that still had access.

Rich Meagher:

Mm-hmm.

Kunle Falayi:

Some agencies here still give access to out- of-state agencies, but that’s another, another discussion. So what we’re saying here, at that time, before the law, almost all the agencies in every state of a country had access to their cameras. And how it happened is that when, um, local law enforcement agencies signs onto this ALPR system, they, they join networks. And so what happens is that someone is sitting in Texas wants to conduct queries on, on Flock system nationwide, they do a blanket search of all the networks they belong to.

Rich Meagher:

Right.

Kunle Falayi:

And then you sitting in Bridgewater belong to this network, and then your data becomes queried in the process without your knowledge.

Rich Meagher:

You know, if it’s just Bridgewater, you’re in Bridgewater and the local Bridgewater police have a picture of your license plate, that’s one thing, but we’re now talking about being caught up in all these national searches millions of times. Is it, is it that scale that makes this so worrying?

Kunle Falayi:

It is. Um, and the reason is that if there is a law in the Virginia that, that specifies how the ALPR can be used, someone in Texas is not bound by that law, meaning that if you continue to share your data with out- of-state agencies, anything can happen. That’s just how it is. There have been cases in which someone, uh, went to obtain abortion in another state and these ALPR was used to track them down. And there are so many instances like that that makes it really worrying for, uh, pe- many people.

Rich Meagher:

And so just to be clear about this, right, the, the camera systems say, “Well, you know, anybody who does something like that tracks, uh, someone getting an abortion or tracks a political protestor, uh, or tracks their ex- girlfriend, right? Anybody who does that, it’s logged in the system, so we have a record of it and we can figure out that they’re doing it wrong.” But what you’re saying is the scope and scale of the data we’re talking about makes it really hard to pick that out. It’s like needle in the haystack kind of stuff.

Kunle Falayi:

In fact, that’s an interesting question because it’s not just about the scale. And now we’re going back to the log itself. In fact, unfortunately, in Virginia right now, even though there’s a law that specifies that, law enforcement must have a policy around how they use ALPR, we found out that at least 16% of law enforcement don’t even have policies that specifies how they can use it. So the question is, how does an auditor go to that log and determine if a, a, a field in which a law enforcement officer wrote investigation in was actually a real investigation on, not something else?

Rich Meagher:

So Flock and other companies have said that it’s the police department that owns this data, right? It’s the police department that needs to determine these policies. It’s not our job to police the police. I- is that a good enough answer?

Kunle Falayi:

You know what’s funny about that answer is that on, on, on one hand, Flock Safety is saying that. On the other hand, they are also coaching law enforcement agencies on how to address public record requests related to Flock’s system, uh, and, and this has been reported by 404 Media, which, which has done extensive reporting about ALPR. So, true. Local law enforcement agencies have control over this data, but one question I asked Flock Safety while we’re reporting this is that who owns this server on which the data resides? And they told me that, well, they don’t own it. This is an ASW server. But I asked them again that who, who are the engineers, the data engineers handling that system? The truth is that the system, even though loc- local law enforcement agencies who take our contract with Flock Safety have access and can control the retention of this data, this data still resides on a system managed by Flock Safety.

Flock Safety, in essence, is the custodian of the data, and we do not have enough clarity on how this data is controlled in the backend. Flock Safety is a data company. They make money from data, so that leaves a lot of concern.

Rich Meagher:

Right. Like, so, like, Facebook is a data company, right? Uh, I mean, this is the thing about Facebook, right? It always drives me nuts trying to use Facebook. It’s because I’m not the customer, I’m the product.

Kunle Falayi:

Exactly. <laugh>

Rich Meagher:

Right? And it’s why I’m being selled. So in this model, right, what you’re saying is that we’re all sort of the product of Flock Safety-

Kunle Falayi:

To some extent we are.

Rich Meagher:

And we just don’t know what they’re doing with, or that they plan to do with our data.

Kunle Falayi:

Well, they, they, they tell us that the, um, the data sort of disappears after the specific period, retention period that each law enforcement agency specifies.

Rich Meagher:

Right. In Virginia, here, it’s 21 days, right?

Kunle Falayi:

21 days, right? So, but then that still leaves a lot of question, does anything digital, does it exactly disappear? I mean, recently we heard about, uh, WhatsApp, data messages you’ve shared that you’ve deleted on WhatsApp can actually still be retrieved by just a stroke of, of the keyboard on the backend. Um, we don’t know if that’s possible with Flock Safety. Uh, Flock Safety insists that law enforcement have 100% control over this, but then we asked if they do not have the infrastructure to keep the data, to hold the data in a, in a physical place where the data can be held, can we really say they have 100% control over that?

Rich Meagher:

So you’re not necessarily raising questions about Flock’s ability to govern the data. It, it sounds like this is a more general concern. Whenever you’re talking about any data company in the modern era that we live in, we have to ask questions about how data’s stored, how secure it is, and, and whether if it’s deleted, I’m holding up air quotes here, it’s actually deleted, right?

Kunle Falayi:

Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

It’s just raising questions about this.

Kunle Falayi:

That’s one of the argument. The other argument is that people are concerned about a system so powerful enabled by artificial intelligence. Their data is what is behind the, the system. They’ve been signed onto the system without their say so, and then without all the risks being discussed with them. And this is why I think what’s happening in places like Stanton and Charlottesville should be a model for a lot of cities. Charlottesville, for example, engaged in extensive discussion with stakeholders about the use of the camera. Uh, do you want it? What are your concerns and things like that? And then, at the end of the day, they decided, according to what the residents decided, that they did not want to use it anymore.

Rich Meagher:

We’ll hear more about Flock cameras when we come back on RVA’s Got Issues.

This is RVA’s Got Issues. I’m Rich Meagher. We’re talking with Kunle Falayi about Flock cameras. So it sounds like, you know, we have these concerns, we don’t know if we can trust these companies, um, we’re not sure what’s happening with the data. What’s the state doing about this again? And is it enough, right? What, what Virginia has done is, is, is different and, and I think more than what a lot of other states have done, is it enough to assuage those concerns?

Kunle Falayi:

Right now, I, I think the ALPR law has achieved some of this. For example, it’s limited the number of days data can be retained, it’s limited how it can be shared, it has given some guidance on what it can be used for. Where many advocates believe that this law may not be adequate is the fact that it doesn’t have any definite specification on how officers can actually query the data or how they should log or explain how they query the data. And I’ll give you an example. There is a field in the log, in the audit log that says every time you use this data, you need to put a reason. They would write a very vague reason-

Rich Meagher:

Yeah.

Kunle Falayi:

… for querying the data. And then officers write in the recent column, “1” or “2”-

Rich Meagher:

Like that’s what they literally write? Just “1”? <laugh>

Kunle Falayi:

Yes. Yes. Sometimes they, they write, um, C or CJ or s- things that we’ve confirmed do not really have any law enforcement explanation. And we’re talking about the reasons they search this log. And if law enforcement is collecting millions and millions of logs every month, how do you think the Virginia State Police would be able to analyze that data or at least find bad actors in that data? It’s difficult.

Rich Meagher:

Well, it’s impo- I mean, you have to, you have to know that the bad thing happened and then figure out that they used the Flock-

Kunle Falayi:

Exactly.

Rich Meagher:

… Because no one’s gonna write down stalking my ex, right?

Kunle Falayi:

Even in cases where, uh, law enforcement write really vague reasons for conducting decide, would the Virginia State Police have the ability to go to officers, individuals and say, “Oh, can you explain why you wrote one, two, three here? Can you explain why you write CJ?” That’s impossible, right? So right now, it, it’s, it’s still impossible to give any meaningful oversight on how, how the system is used.

Rich Meagher:

And that’s, that’s a, a question about the broader context here, right? There is a history of law enforcement agencies using surveillance tools and techniques for purposes other than catching criminals, right? Uh, uh, that, that context has to be mentioned here, right?

Kunle Falayi:

Absolutely.

Rich Meagher:

I’m just thinking of, like, the ’60s movements, right, or Black Panthers or, or, or folks who were targeted by the FBI or, or other law enforcement, sometimes looking at political activists.

Kunle Falayi:

Yeah. Tho- those are very good examples, but I w- I would even cite something recent, um, in all the protests that’s, that’s happened, um, we know that ICE uses various types of technologies to track down individuals that they are after. And sometimes-

Rich Meagher:

Right. Immigration enforcement, yeah.

Kunle Falayi:

…Yes. And sometimes these individuals actually are legal. Um, sometimes they track down someone, arrest someone, put them in detention for days, and then they’re released because ICE doesn’t have a legal basis for, uh, arresting them. That’s the concern for a lot of people.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. So there was this, uh, big lawsuit in Norfolk earlier this year, and it echoed a similar court case in Richmond, uh, earlier in that, where judges ruled that Flock cameras are not a violation of the Fourth Amendment, right? They just don’t rise to the level of the kind of surveillance that would violate your right to privacy, your right to, uh, against unreasonable search and seizure, right? Although there is an appeal pending, but courts generally so far have, have sided with these technologies. Why do you think there, there might be a disconnect between what the courts are saying and what the advocates that you’ve been reporting on are saying?

Kunle Falayi:

I think it has to do with the fact that the courts are, are looking at it from le- a legal perspective. A legal perspective m- may not always explain personal concerns and personal sentiments and personal feelings and, and the concern people have about surveillance generally. People are thinking about the history of surveillance in the world or in the US, but the truth is that who knows what’s gonna happen to this technology tomorrow? There are argument by reporters, especially from 404 media who have said that there’s a potential of this including facial recognition. Right now, it’s not there. And that’s going to substantially increase the capability of this system that’s going to be more concerning. And I’m sure when that happens, advocates will probably go back to the courts and say, “Well, this is what’s happening now.” <laugh> Do you still believe this is not a Fourth Amendment violation?

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. And in fact, the judge in the Norfolk case, I think specifically said, like, “Look, this isn’t forever. This, this decision, uh, you know, certainly right now it seems fine, but, uh, w- this is not some kind of blanket decision about these technologies.” But the kind of way you describe that, right, is the difference between the legal decision and the sort of personal feelings about this. Yeah. Um, it’s not entirely vibes, right? There’s this CNU study, Christopher Newport study of Hampton Roads, right? They got a hold of, of where all the cameras were, and the study showed that the cameras were concentrated in basically black areas of the region, right, with minority black residents. Do we know how the people in these affected neighborhoods feel about these cameras?

Kunle Falayi:

There are, there are people in those neighborhoods who feel like, okay, yeah, this has always been our lives that we’re not shocked by this. There are others, many of the people residents live in these neighborhoods, they believe that they were already overpoliced. Now, the overpolicing in those neighborhoods is now aided by this powerful AI power technology. And so for them, it’s an, an added pressure on, on them that it’s, it’s the usual concern about how police just concentrate energy on places where they believe that crime is happening more than others. That’s the ar- that’s the argument of law enforcement, that, okay, if there is more crime in an area, what do you expect us to do? Well, the truth is that people always feel that you’re overpolicing us. So what do you think is gonna happen? You’re probably going to find things that will justify the overpolicing.

Rich Meagher:

They’re almost resigned to it. I, I mean, there is this argument too, uh, Chief Edwards made this argument, and I’ve seen it also from other, from Flock and other companies, right? That if you rely on this technology, you can reduce overpolicing in other areas, right? So instead of pulling over, you hear there’s a white Camry involved in a crime, you pull over every white camera you can find, and that multiplies the number of interactions with residents that might go badly. You just find the one that was near that, the crime, right? You find the, the license plate reader tells you just this one white Camry, you look for that one as opposed to all the others. So there’s an argument they’re trying to make that this lets us focus our energies on the right people rather than doing some kind of blanket stuff that might be open to bias.

Kunle Falayi:

There have been cases in which, uh, the ALPR cameras have been used to track down individual who turn out not to be those they’re looking for and those people legally, but at least the consequences of being arrested or being pulled through the system of being sort of like profiled. That’s a genuine concern. This is technology, but, uh, technology itself is not perfect. Even if there are few cases, those are still real people.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah. I, it sounds like a lot of this is a little bit about risk and reward, right?

Kunle Falayi:

Yeah.

Rich Meagher:

Do you think the risk of the technology provides more reward? And so we know a lot about the risk, not everything that we need to know. We know a bit about the reward, but not everything that we need to know. I’m just wondering about, I wanna go back to this, this point about the folks in neighborhoods.Right there, there is one of the, the local NAACP leaders in Virginia has supported, come out in support of Flock cameras. Uh, there are voices that come to these public meetings where people say like, it’s a, it’s a technology, you know, if it helps catch criminals, let’s use it. To them, it sounds like the risk is worth the reward. And I just wonder if there are folks out there that we’re just not hearing from who would feel the same way.

Kunle Falayi:

I mean. You probably hear a lot about the opposition to ALPR cameras, but the truth is that many people also support this and we can’t discount an answer why they support it. If you live in a neighborhood where, you are concerned about the crime rate, you probably, some people in those neighborhoods will have the tendency to say, well, if there is any technology that reduces the crime, I want it. That should be recognized as well. We like to hear from those people. Like, like I said, what we’re trying to do in our reporting is to provide as much clarity possible. If we find data that says that actually this Flock camera has increased, crime solving, let’s say robberies by 90% for example, but even by 10%, we would shout that from the rooftop. We would let people know that but it is not enough to say that. Well, it, it helps, yeah. It helps, uh, law enforcement and then just leave it at that. And what, what we’ve seen is that many law enforcement agencies are probably. Now depending so much on this system that even things that probably should require just placing a call, they use the system. And that’s something we’ve heard a lot from many advocates. Like, well, you are using this, can you do without it and not have all these.

Rich Meagher:

Now, use of these cameras seems to only be growing, uh, here in Virginia across the country. So despite all the concerns raised by opponents, for example, Richmond Police Chief Edwards seems convinced of their usefulness, Richmond has budgeted money for next year. Are, are Flock cameras here to stay? Are we gonna have them? They’re just now part of the landscape?

Kunle Falayi:

To be honest, uh, w- with what I’ve seen, I, I’m gonna say it’s here to stay, and we are not going to say that that should not happen. Some advocates are saying that.

Rich Meagher:

Yeah.

Kunle Falayi:

But the thing is that there has to be transparency in the way it’s used in the way the data is collected, the way it’s kept, and in the way it’s disposed with. If it’s going to continue to be their life now, then make sure that people are fully on board and they understand exactly how, how it is used.

Rich Meagher:

Kunle Falayi is a data journalist with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. You can find his reporting at VCIJ.org. Thank you, Kunle.

Kunle Falayi:

Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

Rich Meagher:

That’s our show. Thanks to our guest, Kunle Falayi. Tell us about your issues. Visit our website, rvasgotissues.vpm.org. Follow us on Instagram @richgotissues or send us an email at [email protected]. Be sure to leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform. RVA’s Got Issues is produced by Max Wasserman and Rachel Dwyer. Script editing on this episode by Nicki Stein. Audio mixed by Steve Lack. Our theme music was composed by Alexander Hitchens. Shawn Freude is our executive producer. Steve Humble is VPM’s chief content officer. Rebekah Sausmikat is our European recreation researcher. I’m your host, Rich Meagher. Thanks for listening.