Since 2024, the Bloomington Police Department has contracted the scandal-prone private surveillance company, Flock Safety, to operate a number of automatic license-plate reader cameras around town.
But cities across the country are ending their relationships with Flock. Perhaps it’s time for Bloomington to do the same.
The information these cameras gather about our movements has been shared with Flock's national network with absolutely no transparency or public accountability. BPD has consistently refused to answer basic questions that would provide Bloomington residents the ability to offer their informed consent: Where exactly are the cameras? How many are there? And how much are they costing us?
We, the public, deserve to have a say in how our information is used, and if the benefits of this technology outweigh the potential for misuse.
After multiple public records requests, the city ultimately released a heavily redacted copy of its contract with Flock Safety, in which only the boilerplate contract jargon escaped the black ink. Flock’s fees did not.
However, a search of the city’s public spending data reveals $236,830 in payments made to Flock Safety since the contract began in 2024. While about half of that sum was drawn from accounts that typically cover BPD expenses, $131,530 came from the city’s Housing and Neighborhood Development, or HAND, account. This is money raised by the Economic Development Local Income Tax that we all pay.
The city also denied subsequent requests to disclose the cameras’ locations, citing a fear of “exposing a vulnerability to terrorist attack.” They have not even released the number of cameras deployed, although according to documents requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BPD operated at least 40 Flock cameras as of last year.
At times, data collected by these cameras has been searchable by local law enforcement agencies around the country that contract with Flock. If that remains the case, even if BPD wanted to guarantee that the data collected here would be used only in specific cases, they could not.
The city was asked to release the logs of every time its cameras were queried in national searches, which would give the public more insight into how the data was being used, but again, they refused for fear of “exposing a vulnerability to terrorist attack.”
Flock has drawn ire in recent months after 404 media reported that ICE used its data in its enforcement operations. While ICE does not hold a contract with Flock, local law enforcement agencies that do have performed searches on their behalf in what has been characterized as “side-door access.”
Other reporting has raised flags about local police using Flock’s technology to surveil No Kings protesters and an abortion-seeker. Most searches do not require a warrant, which leaves much to the discretion of the individuals performing the searches.
Putting aside the implications for law enforcement, another conversation entirely must be had about the privacy concerns raised by Flock’s handling of the sensitive information it collects.
After highlighting more than 60 published system vulnerabilities, YouTube journalist Benn Jordan demonstrated that many of Flock’s Condor cameras, which use AI to track and zoom in on human faces, were streaming directly to the web, unprotected, in what he described as “Netflix for stalkers.”
As far as we know, BPD has not deployed any Condor cameras, but even the use of the ALPRs raises privacy concerns. Flock has been building a tool to “jump from LPR to person” using information from people lookup tools, data brokers and data breaches, according to 404 media. In internal messages, Flock’s employees expressed concerns about the ethics of using hacked data.
For these and other reasons, cities across the country, including Oak Park, Illinois, and Austin, Texas, have cut their contracts with Flock Safety. And now the issue has been raised here in Bloomington with the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America staging a walkout Friday, Jan. 30, to demand an end to BPD’s Flock contract, and a petition to the same effect in circulation.
At a virtual town hall on Monday night, Mayor Kerry Thomson said that she would meet with Flock Safety next month to discuss residents’ concerns, but in response to a question about whether the benefits of the technology outweighed the risks, the mayor only addressed the benefits.
But in order to have a meaningful answer to that question, we must have a frank discussion that includes all the facts, not just the convenient ones. If surveillance is being performed on us, on our behalf and using our tax dollars, we should be the ones to decide whether it's worth it.
Hali Tauxe (she/her) is a graduate of the IU Media School turned concerned citizen of Bloomington. She uses the skills she learned studying journalism to serve her new community.
