LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire, citing ‘serious concerns’ over civil liberties and privacy

The Los Angeles Police Department is reportedly ending its deal with Flock Safety, a surveillance company that helps law enforcement track vehicles using thousands of its license plate cameras placed across the United States.

A senior LAPD official told news outlets, first reported by ABC7 and The Los Angeles Times, that the police department would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire when it ends on Saturday. The department cited “serious concerns” around civil liberties and privacy. Flock’s cameras are operated by the Atlanta, Georgia-based company and not the LAPD.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas was quoted as saying. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

A spokesperson for the LAPD did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch over the weekend, and it’s unclear if Flock’s cameras will continue recording in absence of an active contract. According to ABC7, the police department is seeking new language in its contract addressing privacy and data storage concerns.

As the third-largest police department in the U.S., the LAPD is one of Flock’s largest government customers to date. Several major U.S. cities have also stopped working with Flock, including Mountain View, California and South Portland, Maine, citing privacy worries and concerns that federal immigration officials used the cameras to track people in violation of their local laws governing their sanctuary city policies.

The contract expiry caught the surveillance company by “surprise,” said Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin in an email to TechCrunch. Flock said it was confident that the company could “clear up the current misconceptions” that led to the contract’s end. Flock would not say which specific misconceptions it was referring to.

Flock has a network of at least 80,000 cameras around the U.S. that scan license plates and allow police and federal agencies to track vehicles. 

The company has faced heavy backlash from local communities that have approved and then reneged on their deals with Flock over concerns with privacy and surveillance. Some locals have taken matters into their own hands by dismantling Flock cameras and covering them with trash bags, even as some communities found that Flock reinstalled cameras without permission from local authorities.

Researchers have identified an uptick in documented cases of motorists being pulled over, detained, and held at gunpoint by police, or jailed, due to false positives and errors with license plate readers. Last week, a journalist with car reviews and news website The Drive detailed how he was tracked for days and later boxed-in by police after a Flock camera mistakenly flagged the license plate of the on-loan review unit he was driving as stolen.

Flock has also faced scrutiny following several security lapses that have exposed cameras and data, which in one case, allowed independent news outlet 404 Media to watch themselves live on publicly exposed Flock cameras. Lawmakers have also urged federal consumer authorities to investigate Flock for failing to implement measures that would prevent hackers and spies from gaining access to its security cameras, warning that many of the police user logins are not protected with multi-factor authentication.

404 Media also reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used a local police officer’s password without their knowledge to search for a suspect accused of an immigration violation.

Do you know about security or privacy issues with Flock Safety, or issues with Flock cameras in your community? We would love to hear from you. From a non-work device, you can securely contact Zack Whittaker on the Signal messaging app with the username zackwhittaker.1337