Let’s talk about surveillance.
The City of Carrollton has contracts with Flock Safety, a private technology company that uses cameras, Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), and AI-enabled technology to surveil our city. With approximately 90 cameras connected to Flock’s cloud-based platform, Flock is able to create a “Vehicle Fingerprint” that goes beyond typical license plate recognition to identify unique vehicle characteristics such as bumper stickers, roof racks, aftermarket wheels, and more.
AI-powered cloud software analyzes much more than a “Vehicle Fingerprint”. Although Flock states that they have not presently incorporated facial recognition into their software, the feeds from Flock’s ALPR cameras have already been combined with existing facial recognition software by individual police departments (most notably New Orleans ). Flock is the largest Fixed LPR Network, and allows other organizations to access ALPR data from Carrollton.
What’s being recorded about us?
Short answer - a lot.
Your plate number, make, model, color - every single vehicle captured is tagged with timestamp & location, uploaded to Flock’s cloud servers in real time.
Distinguishing features? Flock documents everything about your vehicle, whether it’s got a bike carrier, roof rack, trailer, bumper stickers, license plate frames, even dents or missing bumpers.
Your location history. Where’d you go? How often do you go there? What time of day? With cameras at every major intersection, and even in some of our neighborhoods, ALPRs are creating detailed maps of where we live, worship, and work. No warrant or any active investigation is required - this is preemptive policing of residents’ activity.
Who can access the cameras’ data feeds?
Pretty much anyone with a login to Flock Safety can look up your vehicle (and you!)
This includes:
Carrollton Police Department
Any & all federal, state or local agencies that subscribe to Flock. Our data is visible not just to Carrollton PD, but to agencies ranging from Fort Worth PD, to Tampa, Florida PD, to Scottsdale, AZ PD.
HOAs and private vendors using Flock have access to their own images but not the broader database, but their captures are fed into the full database and available for law enforcement users to query.
But it’s a pain to look this info up, right? WRONG.
AI is a fantastic tool with a wide range of helpful day-to-day applications, but who wants it conducting passive surveillance on you every time you leave your house?
Unfortunately, this isn’t science fiction, tin-hat stuff. You can buy a commercial off the shelf system for use in a small business for well under $1,000 that can successfully perform keyword searches for items such as “red pickup”, “lady with a dog”, “stroller”, “young girl” or “vintage Chevy”.
Flock does the same thing, except that the company (and others like it, but Carrollton is contracted with Flock, so that’s who we’re focusing on) is private equity backed and has the funding in place to do way more than the examples above.
For instance, the company says they are not currently doing facial recognition, but these cameras are live feed pan/tilt/zoom, not just snapping a still of a license plate. AI is already capable of performing facial recognition tasks. Some police departments are already pairing their facial recognition software with Flock’s dataset for active monitoring.