Communities have increasingly been cutting ties with Flock Safety, the makers of cameras with automated license plate readers that have been abused by law enforcement and falsely associated innocent people with crimes. And when the government won’t do something about it, citizens will. The latest example of this comes from Irmo, South Carolina, where local news station WIS News 10 reported that Flock cameras got spray-coated with foam sealant.
Irmo, population 12,204, reportedly has 11 ALPRs installed throughout the town, with more to come. Last month, Irmo’s Town Council voted to approve a $400,000 contract with Flock to add 22 mor —and, just for clarity, that is Irmo agreeing to pay Flock, pulling money from the town’s general funds to pony up for the new cameras.
The town, to its credit, tried to stop them. People showed up to the public hearing and expressed their displeasure. Per WIS News 10, one person had to be removed from the hearing after things got a little too heated. But the council went ahead and voted in favor of adding the cameras, which have not yet been installed, by a vote of four in favor to one opposed.
Now it’ll presumably be 22 new cameras and two replacements, since an unidentified resident plastered a couple of Flock cameras with foam sealant typically used for filling cracks and creating seals. You can add it to the growing list of vandalism/vigilantism aimed at Flock’s equipment. Past approaches have included spray painting over the lenses, ramming them with trucks, physically pulling them down, cutting them down, and obstructing their view.
The ongoing effort by communities to push back against the surveillance tools has clearly gotten to Flock. Earlier this week, the company announced that it would shorten the default data retention period for how long it holds onto images of people’s vehicles and will tweak the way that officers can search for cars through its platform after a slew of instances in which cops stalk people using the cameras.
That said, it’s instructive to see some of the comments that WIS News 10 collected from residents following the recent foam sealant situation. A resident named Gloria told the outlet, “I think it’s really sad that in our world today it is so evil that people think they’ve got to tear up what taxpayers are paying for,” and said, “The only thing it does is frighten people in a community that’s safe. If they’re doing this, do they have other plans, or is their goal just to destroy these Flocks because they don’t want them there?”
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