Dear City Council / County Legislature,

I am writing to express my strong concern and opposition to the deployment of Flock Safety cameras in our neighborhood. While I understand the intent behind enhancing community safety, I believe the installation of these surveillance systems raises serious issues regarding privacy, oversight, and long-term consequences for civil liberties.

Numerous independent organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU, have raised red flags about Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems. These cameras collect detailed data about vehicle movements—including location, time, and vehicle characteristics—without meaningful consent from the public. In essence, this establishes a permanent surveillance infrastructure without transparent safeguards or accountability.

I’d like to highlight a few specific concerns:

Lack of Public Awareness and Input: Flock cameras have been installed without any meaningful public discourse. The general public is mostly unaware that this technology exists. Though it is our data being collected, our voices have not been heard.
Potential for Misuse and Mission Creep: There is no independent auditing mechanism to verify how data is actually used. Legal experts and civil rights advocates warn that such data could be abused for unrelated investigations or shared across agencies inappropriately.
Questionable Effectiveness: Despite claims of crime reduction, multiple studies suggest the number of “hits” compared the amount of data collected is extremely low. Meaning the vast majority of data collected is all of us going about our daily lives. In a statewide study from Maryland (cnsmaryland.org, 2014), the first state to use a statewide system of license plate readers, 0.2% of license plate reads were “hits.” And 97% of these hits were for suspended licenses and emissions violations. Local example: many people in Ithaca complain about the crime around the commons. Most of these crimes do not involve people driving cars.
Evolving AI capabilities and Fourth Amendment Concerns: We have no oversight in place that requires law enforcement to keep us informed on what features and upgrades Flock might offer next. Without clear oversight and full transparency, we may be subjected to more and more invasive surveillance.

I acknowledge that the Ithaca City police and Tompkins County Sheriff likely implemented Flock Safety technology with good intentions, and may not have realized the suspicion and distrust that was immediately created by placing cameras around our neighborhood.  I urge our local governing bodies to pause the use of Flock technology in our community until a strategy that addresses the privacy rights and concerns of residents can be fully developed and implemented.