At least nine Massachusetts communities have recently cut ties with Flock Safety after residents raised privacy and civil-liberty complaints about surveillance cameras used by local police. The backlash has spread across communities that installed the cameras along public roads, where they can record car movements townwide.
Dustin Weir, a Tewksbury resident and engineer, said the issue got real when he asked police for an image of his Toyota Highlander that one camera captured on the day he dropped his child off at school. He said he would have far less of a problem with the system if a warrant were required for every Flock camera search.
Tewksbury and the search records
Tewksbury had installed some 20 Flock cameras at intersections around town. Weir, who also has a Ring doorbell camera at home, framed the dispute around scope rather than the existence of cameras alone.
“We use these devices — Ring cameras, cellphones — as consumers. It does generate data that can help law enforcement, but there are guardrails there.”
“If a warrant was required for every Flock camera search, then I would have far less of a problem with that.”
“Is taking pictures of every single car in and out of Tewksbury going too far in the balance of our civil liberties versus our security?”
The communities moving away from Flock include Cambridge, Framingham, and Salem. Boston had a brief pilot with Flock but did not extend it, showing the pushback is not limited to towns that are still trying the system for the first time.
Warrants and wider access
The fight has hardened because law enforcement, including federal immigration agents, has been able to access and share information from the cameras without first getting a warrant. That is the point where a search tool becomes a civil-liberties fight for residents who do not want plate reads turned into a townwide record of where cars travel.
Flock says its cameras have helped police find more than 10,000 missing people nationwide, and in July Cohasset police said officers recovered two stolen Mercedes-Benz SUVs within hours by using Flock. In December, the cameras were instrumental in pinpointing a mass shooter who opened fire on students at Brown University.
The system now sits in a narrow middle ground: some Massachusetts communities are ending their contracts, while others are still weighing whether the tradeoff is acceptable. The unresolved issue is not whether the cameras work, but which rules would make their use acceptable enough for residents who want search guardrails before another town signs on.
