Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras with Trash Bags

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used. 

Joe Parlette, the deputy city manager of Dayton, said at a city commission meeting last week that the “Dayton Police Department agreed to work with Public Works to put bags over the cameras” as a stop-gap measure until Flock cameras could be removed entirely. I spoke to multiple people in Dayton who said they had seen bagged cameras in the last few days. The Dayton Daily News first reported on the baggings.

Dayton is not the first city to cover its Flock cameras with trash bags because they can’t figure out how to immediately terminate the use of the cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois also covered its cameras with trash bags while it was waiting for the company to remove them from the city. Cities around the country have been reconsidering their relationship with the surveillance company after reporting from 404 Media and local news outlets that showed data from the cameras was making its way to Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national camera network. 

Most cities that have reconsidered their contracts have done so via city council meetings and public debate that have played out over the course of months, and both Dayton and Evanston city officials told residents that they were not sure whether they could immediately deactivate or remove the cameras under the terms of their contracts. And so both cities decided to physically block them as a stop-gap measure, showing that cities feel that they do not have the ability to unilaterally decide when to stop using Flock surveillance cameras.

The bagging came after Dayton city commissioner Darius Beckham said at a city commission meeting last week that the city has been “requesting that the Flock cameras be taken down. I think we are working through how soon we can do that. I think in the interim, we are trying to figure out what steps can be taken to mitigate the vulnerability and concerns that there are still recordings being taken.” Covering them with trash bags is the idea the city ultimately came up with.

Cities are not sure what their contracts state how to extricate themselves from those contracts, or whether the cameras are recording (and where that data is going). This uncertainty highlights the problems associated with using private, third-party surveillance infrastructure. Last week, for example, the mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin said that Flock cameras in the city “have been activated without city council approval.”  

Dayton has had Flock cameras in the city for several years, but in October the city learned that data from the cameras was being passed to the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national network, which is a phenomenon we first reported in May of last year. The city claimed that it did not intend for this sharing to happen, and that a specific police officer “failed to implement the safeguards he helped develop” to prevent the sharing; essentially, a setting to prevent the sharing was not enabled. On May 1, the police department announced that it was “indefinitely suspending the use of our fixed-site automated license plate readers” because of this data sharing, and that the officer who failed to implement the privacy safeguards would be leaving the department.  

“It’s very disappointing, and disappointing would be a pretty mild word,” Dayton Police Chief Kamran Afzal said in a press conference earlier this month. “Disappointing would be a pretty mild word. My choice words I cannot say live on air or how I really feel, but it’s disappointing and disgusting would be another word I would use … absolutely it was user error. It’s nothing more than that because we shut things down right away as soon as we found out [about the sharing]. All they needed to do was hit a toggle button saying ‘nope, no sharing’ and then we were done.” On March 31, Afzal announced he would be resigning this summer to take another job in North Carolina. 

For months, city residents have been calling for more accountability from the city of Dayton and for the resignation of Dayton’s city manager over the use of Flock cameras. Melissa Bertolo, who has been pushing against Flock cameras through an organization called DeFlock Dayton and the Coalition for Public Protection, told 404 Media that the work of residents to push for transparency about Flock data sharing practices in the city has brought the issue to the forefront. 

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Bertolo said of covering the cameras, adding that, ultimately the cameras need to come down. “Our coalition has made six demands—covering the cameras is not one of them. Removal of the cameras is one of them. It’s a step toward that. We have had all five city commissioners saying they agreed with taking down the cameras, but they say there’s a process to figuring that out … so even if the program is quote unquote ‘suspended’ data is still able to be captured. We can’t just say the program is suspended until we can actively know they’re down.” 

One of the major questions is whether Dayton is actually going to end the Flock program, and how it will be able to do so. In August, Evanston terminated its contract with Flock, and the Flock cameras were removed. The city then claimed Flock “reinstalled the cameras without the city’s permission,” and sent the company a cease-and-desist. Reporting by the Evanston Roundtable suggested that the cameras were possibly active after they had been reinstalled. The city then decided to cover the cameras with trash bags; the cameras were fully removed from the city earlier this year.  

“All Flock cameras have been removed from Evanston,” a spokesperson for the city of Evanston told 404 Media. “The cameras are owned by Flock and had to be removed by Flock. While we awaited the removal, we covered them.”

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that “of course, any city can turn off its cameras if it no longer wants to use them. However, each contract is negotiated with the city attorney beforehand, and legal conditions may prevent a city from voiding the contract without grounds to do so.” 

“Our goal is to ensure city leaders make that decision with open eyes, regardless of the contract,” the spokesperson added. “You're well aware of the volume of misinformation that has spread thru Reddit threads and on YouTube, and we always want to ensure that a city fully understands the impact of their decision before cameras are turned off. Like Richmond, CA claiming they saw a 33% spike in auto thefts during the time cameras were off, or multiple violent incidents in Austin, Texas that would have ended much earlier had they been using Flock.”

Notably, Flock said that it wants to keep working with the city of Dayton: “We're proud to work with the city of Dayton, OH and hope we can continue.”

The City of Dayton did not respond to a request for comment.