California HOAs Are Buying Up Flock License Plate Readers; Giving Cops Open Access To Them

Flock Safety — a relatively recent entrant to the surveillance tech arena — is branching out. It’s courting cops with cheap ALPR cameras, unproven claims about crime reduction, and a little lawbreaking of its own.

But it hasn’t abandoned its roots. It first hit the scene with plate readers it pitched to the Fun Police: homeowners associations and the even deeper pockets overseeing our nation’s many gated communities.

Flock tells HOAs and the heads of carefully curated communities things like “Flock Safety is the only security camera that stops property crime.” It’s a laughable claim. For one, Flock’s cameras are cameras and pretty much any security camera will have some effect on crime. Second, cameras don’t prevent crime. They simply make it easier to investigate crime.

The ALPRs sold to HOAs by Flock may have a bit more of a preventative effect. “May” is the operative word — one not found in Flock’s advertising materials. And, given what’s already been reported about Flock’s HOA inroads, it appears Flock views itself as just another cop shop, albeit one that has (until recently) courted private markets.

It apparently encourages private purchasers of its cameras and plate readers to regard themselves the same way. As this report by Eli Wolfe for The Oaklandside points out, Flock customers are doing what the city of Oakland can’t (at least at this point): filling neighborhoods with ALPRs and providing cops with access to whatever’s been collected.

Last October, the city of Oakland announced it would soon be installing 300 automated license plate readers—cameras that monitor public streets and instantly scan vehicle license plates, running them against “hot lists” for stolen cars or vehicles associated with crimes. 

But the rollout of Oakland’s big new vehicle surveillance system has gotten bogged down as officials from the city and California Highway Patrol try to figure out how to pay for and operate the cameras.

Meanwhile, private communities in Oakland are speeding ahead with plans to install similar—albeit smaller—surveillance systems to watch public roads. At least one homeowner group already has cameras up and running and is sharing data with law enforcement agencies.

I guess the theory in Oakland is that adding a bunch of ALPR cameras will suddenly make ALPRs useful. They certainly haven’t been so far. According to earlier reporting, the Oakland PD has had 36 patrol cars outfitted with ALPRs, but those failed to generate a single investigative lead in 2022. This group of cameras was perhaps key to the recovery of 57 cars in 13 years: roughly four per year.

So, the city will eventually add 300 cameras in a move that values quantity over quality. Until that network’s in place, it appears some people in the private sector are willing to spend their own money to fill supposed gaps in coverage — especially if those “gaps” include their little fiefdoms.

The one HOA giving law enforcement agencies access to its cameras has proven incredibly popular, especially with the California Highway Patrol — an entity that generally isn’t tasked with patrolling residential areas.

Jim Donatell, a member of the board of directors of the Lakeshore association, said that between mid-February and mid-March, the cameras captured images of 347,000 license plates and got 259 hits on “hot lists” for vehicles wanted in connection to crimes or missing persons. The nine local law enforcement agencies that have access to the group’s camera data conducted 5,540 searches during that period.

The California Highway Patrol conducted the most searches of the HOA’s camera data: 3,476 over the last month.

The article cites stats provided by the CHP, which has engaged in two “surge” operations since the beginning of the year, resulting in several dozen arrests and hundreds of recovered vehicles. Donatell believes the HOA’s cameras contributed to these efforts but, of course, has no data to back that up. The CHP has also not provided any information that would suggest the HOA’s network of eight cameras (and the CHP’s thousands of searches) helped add to the arrest/recovery tally.

And that’s part of the problem here. The HOA is a private organization and Flock is a private company. Neither is obliged to provide information to the public about these cameras, despite the fact that law enforcement agencies are accessing collected data more frequently than the cameras’ private owners.

This access is apparently plug-and-play, right out of the box, so long as law enforcement sign an agreement with Flock.

According to Donatell, the cameras were only active for a few hours before law enforcement agencies started using them in searches. It’s also easy to give agencies access to the system, Donatell said. 

“With Flock, it was literally a five-minute interaction,” Donatell said. The HOA is unable to share data with Oakland police because the department doesn’t have an agreement in place with Flock, he said.

Problematic, but not much anyone can do about that. Private entities are free to share whatever they want with public agencies. The fact that this information includes stuff generated by people who never agreed to this information-sharing doesn’t really matter, not when it’s nothing more than snapping shots of license plates on cars traversing public roads.

Oddly, it’s the purchasers of the cameras who are more limited in their access to information. The article points out private ALPR operators are informed of hot list hits, but provided no information about the vehicles themselves. They can also see when and how often law enforcement performs searches of their data, but have no insight into why the search was performed or what vehicles were targeted.

This asymmetric “sharing” strongly suggests Flock feels its cameras should be natural extensions of surveillance networks constructed by government agencies, rather than something belonging to the entities that actually purchased the cameras. It also suggests there’s no reason to install these if you’re not going to give law enforcement access to data, because without the information law enforcement has access to, they’re pretty much useless to HOAs and gated communities.

Given these facts, this probably isn’t going to end well. At some point, Flock, its private customers, or its law enforcement data leaches are going to do something to screw this up. And when that happens, cities and states are going to be forced to do a little bit more direct regulation of consumer surveillance products.