Like in dozens of communities across the country, many Littleton residents were displeased to learn about the installation of Flock Safety’s automatic license plate-reading cameras earlier this year. In May, following backlash, town officials voted to shut down the six cameras on public roads.
Last week, police discovered Flock had restored power to the cameras without notifying the town.
The discovery, detailed in a Littleton Police Department notice this week, led the department to order the cameras remotely powered down, disable system login access for officers, and confirm a Flock work order was in place to remove the cameras from utility poles “as soon as possible.’’
The revelation is the latest controversy to hit Flock, whose AI-powered automatic license plate-reading cameras photograph the back of each passing vehicle, noting details like make, model, and color, and store each time-stamped image in a central database with easy sharing between police agencies.
In Massachusetts alone, at least nine cities and towns, including Cambridge, Framingham, and Salem, have pulled the plug on their contracts with Flock in the last year amid backlash over privacy concerns, misuse of the technology by law enforcement, and potential data access by federal immigration agents.
In Littleton, a July 30 town announcement stated the Select Board had “directed Town Counsel to initiate cancellation of the contract with Flock Safety,’’ but Town Administrator James Duggan told a Globe reporter Wednesday that the town has not canceled its contract and is in the process of reviewing “the technology and concept.’’
The Police Department statement released on Tuesday noted that “the program had been defunded at Town Meeting.’’
The statement also detailed the course of events that led to the cameras being reactivated without notice. It said that while the Police Department had told Flock that the Select Board “had voted to de-energize the cameras’’ and that “we were holding off on using the system,’’ it said it did not “explicitly inform Flock that we were turning cameras off at the town-level.’’ Last week, a detective logged on to the system to confirm the cameras remained off, only to discover that Flock had reactivated five cameras.
“Power was restored to the cameras based on Flock’s standard operating procedure, since they were unaware we did not intend to turn the cameras back on,’’ the statement read.
According to the statement, Littleton Police Chief Douglas Landry met with a Flock technician following the incident, and “given the volume of vandalism and tampering incidents the company has dealt with nationally, it would not necessarily be treated as unusual on [Flock’s] end’’ to have a camera need to be turned back on unexpectedly.
Last week’s announcement clarified that “there is no data shared from Littleton cameras to other jurisdictions and at no time did LPD access any data gathered by the cameras in Littleton while they were powered.’’
A spokesperson for Flock declined to comment and pointed a Globe reporter to Littleton’s statement.
There have been several incidents where Flock cameras were reinstalled or reactivated after a community ordered the plug pulled.
In Evanston, Ill., last year, the city covered cameras and issued a cease-and-desist order after Flock reinstalled cameras without authorization.
Officials in Cambridge also announced in December that after a batch of Flock cameras had been removed, two had been installed without notification, leading the city to terminate its contract with Flock. At the time, city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick called it “a breach of trust.’’
During a December interview with the Globe following the Cambridge incident, Flock’s chief legal officer, Dan Haley, said the cameras were installed due to an existing work order and not “a nefarious thing.’’
“To breach trust, you have to have trust. And the people who were reacting to that, they didn’t have trust in our company to begin with,’’ he added.
Unlike conventional CCTV cameras, law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to access information from Flock’s system, and police departments that subscribe to Flock’s service can choose to share their data with other agencies, both in and out of state.
This network has helped in thousands of missing persons cases and to locate the shooter who killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor last year. But dozens of cases of misuse have also been reported, such as officers using it to search for ex-girlfriends. Some jurisdictions have also shared people’s data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Landry, the Littleton police chief, was due to meet with Flock representatives this week “to gain a full and accurate understanding of the system, the service agreement, and what LPD has committed to as a user of this platform,’’ per the Tuesday announcement.
“Public safety will always be a priority for this department, but it must be pursued in partnership with the community we serve, not around it,’’ Landry said in a statement.