By The Editorial Board
In and around Waco, tall, charcoal cameras have begun popping up, looming over the roadways. These devices, largely known as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) and Flock cameras, scan and log the information of each car that drives past.
Marketed as license plate readers, cameras like Flock and other similar brands have impacts that extend far beyond helping hand out speeding tickets and traffic fines. They create an environment of mass surveillance where not only our privacy is threatened, but our constitutional rights.
Waco does not currently have any Flock-branded cameras, but the Waco Police Department has confirmed it uses ALPR cameras to identify vehicles.
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans’ rights against unlawful searches and seizures. It is largely regarded as the amendment that protects Americans’ privacy. Law enforcement must have a warrant and probable cause before investigating a person suspected of a crime. Most would argue that driving safely down a main road in a registered vehicle does not warrant investigation.
Beyond reading license plates, Flock has integrated AI capabilities into its systems to create “vehicle fingerprints” for each car it scans. Users can search for cars by make, color or even bumper stickers and track matching cars’ movements. Without consent, the information of drivers is uploaded into databases.
As for how this data is used, law enforcement has broken the trust of countless communities by abusing Flock’s technology.
A Houston police officer is currently facing charges of stalking and misusing official information after allegedly stalking his ex-wife with license plate readers. In other cases, innocent drivers have been misidentified as car thieves, pulled over and, in some cases, had guns drawn on them.
Aside from various instances of misuse by law enforcement, the cameras themselves cannot reliably pull accurate information. Flock Safety, the leading distributor of Flock cameras, reports that their cameras accurately capture only 93% of license plates — a concerningly low rate given the number of encounters innocent drivers have with law enforcement.
To recap, Flock cameras are provenly unreliable, have a record of being misused by police and track data on each driver that passes by. That is quite the unsavory combo, especially when you consider that installing and leasing one camera can cost $3,350.
Naturally, debates over introducing Flock cameras in towns around Waco have sparked. The concept of introducing unreliable, violating and frequently misused cameras onto our roads seems laughable, but local governments don’t always seem to agree.
Thankfully, Texas took a productive step by barring the entrance of additional cameras. Gov. Greg Abbott recently ordered a pause on state funding for these devices; however, most cameras in the state are federally funded, meaning the risk of implementation remains high.
As we’ve heard time and time again, being present in local elections and engaging in civil discourse is important as ever. Resisting the push for Flock and government surveillance has become non-negotiable, because without it, we risk losing one of our most important constitutional rights.
The introduction of ALPR surveillance has hurt dozens of communities; it’s up to us to protect Waco from being next.
