A group of starlings is a murmuration. A gathering of crows is a murder. And a horde of ravens is a conspiracy.
The owl-like license plate readers installed across the city of Durango: Those are Flock cameras.
Collective nouns for birds were often derived from quaint observations of the species’ behavior. So, if Durango Police Department’s Flock cameras had a collective noun of their own, the group might be called an observation.
Positioned discretely, mounted permanently on existing traffic control apparatus or a 12-foot pole of their own, Durango’s Flock cameras go mostly unobserved as they catalog every passing car.
Durango police now have a baker’s dozen of these lenticular sentries posted throughout the city, mostly on the thoroughfares that take drivers in and out of city limits.
The cameras are a powerful crime-fighting tool, Durango police officers say, that allow them to quickly locate stolen vehicles, act on arrest warrants and identify suspects. Civil rights groups, including the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, have raised privacy concerns over the technology and the expansive and loosely regulated data sharing between agencies that occurs.
Flock cameras take a static photograph of every passing car.
They catalog its license plate and create a “vehicle fingerprint” based off the vehicle type, make, color and other unique features, such as stickers or roof racks. That data is saved for 30 days on the cloud and then deleted.
Durango paid one-time fees totaling $59,400 and an annual fee of $47,000 for the technology. The first camera went up about a year ago and the last of DPD’s initial order of 13 cameras was installed in February.
Part of the allure for local law enforcement is Flock’s expansive network.
Since 2017, Flock camera’s have proliferated around the country, including neighboring communities such as Farmington, in Montezuma County, Grand Junction and Telluride. The venture-capital backed company now says its worth $7.5 billion.
Durango Police have access to images from 25,600 Flock cameras nationwide (a number that grows weekly), and the department shares images from its cameras with 271 other law enforcement agencies that have requested access and been approved on an individual basis. Law enforcement may also access images from privately owned Flock cameras, such as those installed by homeowners associations or businesses (Home Depot will soon have Flock cameras at every store to fight organized crime).
The system, which every officer can access remotely, has two primary functions.
Each plate gets crossed-checked with Colorado Crime Information Center, a database managed by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the National Crime Information Center, a database managed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Officers can also manually add alerts for specific vehicles.
Durango police get a notification anytime a vehicle that’s been stolen or is registered to someone with an active warrant passes by one of their 13 cameras.
That’s the most common way officers use Flock, said Durango Police Cmdr. Nick Stasi.
Over the course of an hourlong tour of the system, alerts buzzed on Stasi’s computer a handful of times to inform him that someone with an active warrant – or at least a car registered to someone with a warrant – had passed one of the department’s cameras.
The second function is the search.
Officers can query an array of cameras – as few as one, or as many as 25,600 – with complete or partial license plates. They can also search for distinguishing features identified in the vehicle fingerprint.
Searches can only be performed by an officer using a unique login “for legitimate law enforcement purposes only,” according to DPD’s internal policy governing use of the technology. The policy also outlines that the system shall be audited quarterly – an update in the last two months from language mandating “regular” audits.
The Durango Herald filed a records request for the previous three audits conducted. The only responsive record was a single audit Stasi produced during an interview at the Herald’s request.
“This was the first quarter that we would have had with all of the cameras up,” Stasi said, noting that the past policy was too vague.
According to the results of that audit, police officers searched the database 527 times (not including demonstrations) over a 30-day period looking for 89 unique license plates; 114 of those searches did not include a partial or complete plate, but used other limiting factors such as a description of the vehicle. In some cases, officers reviewed images from a single camera without refining the search by vehicle.
A spokesman for Flock initially expressed interest in an interview but did not respond to further repeated requests.
Police officers do not need a warrant to search the Flock database. However, they must enter a valid reason for their query according to both Flock and departmental policy. That’s as simple as typing a case number, “missing person” or any other police-work related term into the search field.
“We use it a lot for stolen cars,” said DPD Officer Richard Clamp. “Once you report it stolen, then (the car will) start pinging on Flock. My last one, we saw that it was all over East 32nd and we last saw it was southbound, which means, OK, it’s in New Mexico. And then it was found in New Mexico.”
In the last 30 days, officers searching the database listed stolen vehicle as the reason at least 95 times. Hit and runs, shoplifting and active warrants were all common reasons listed as well.
Stasi said the cameras are a force multiplier for the department.
He cited a recent example of a pickup truck that had been stolen in Grand Junction. An alert was sent to officers when the truck passed a Flock camera heading into Durango, and the driver was arrested when he returned to the vehicle in the Albertsons parking lot.
Without Flock cameras, that driver “would have left town, and we would have never known he came or left,” Stasi said.
The police department’s social media occasionally uses the playful hashtag “#YasFlock” to feature success stories of suspects apprehended using the technology. Stasi said Flock cameras have led to the recovery of several other stolen vehicles.
The 13 cameras are positioned mainly along the highways near city limits, as well as on East 32nd Street and Florida Road.
“Our goal from the beginning was to be able to identify all the cars coming and going from city limits,” he said. “Our intent to is to help identify suspects and solve crimes. We are not using it monitor people’s daily activities.”
Data from the cameras is encrypted for its entire lifetime, generally 30 days.
Law enforcement may save the data beyond 30 days if it will be needed in a legal case. Flock, in its own terms and conditions, carves out a loophole in which it may preserve and release data to law enforcement or other third parties if legally required to do so or if the company “has a good faith belief” that doing so is necessary “to comply with a legal process, enforce this Agreement, or detect, prevent or otherwise address security, privacy, fraud or technical issues, or emergency situations.”
The proliferation of automated license plate readers nationwide has prompted civil liberties advocates to raise numerous concerns about mass surveillance, mistakes and the possible infringement on Americans’ protection from unreasonable searches and seizures enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
“The more contracts, the more cameras, the greater usage – I think there is a reality in the future where Fourth Amendment violations, because of the use of Flock, could be very real,” said Anaya Robinson, senior policy strategist at the ACLU of Colorado.
The national ACLU objects to Flock’s pooling of license plate data, calling it a “centralized mass surveillance system of Orwellian scope.”
Flock cameras are all placed on public roads in locations where there is no legally recognized expectation of privacy.
A transparency page posted on the city’s website details the camera’s uses. It says use of the data for “Immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, usage based solely on a protected class” are all prohibited.
Flock does not use facial recognition, and all of Durango’s cameras are set up to capture images of a vehicle’s rear plate. In none of the images reviewed by the Herald was a driver’s face visible.
Courts have been clear that use of an ALPR to capture and search for a single vehicle does not constitute a warrantless search barred by the constitution. However, courts have also indicated that use of ALPRs to track an individual’s habitual transit could run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, although such a case has yet to turn up.
Stasi said he’s aware of the privacy concerns and said there was a discussion about them before the installation began. When asked about those discussions, he pivoted back to the utility of the cameras.
“We’re using it to solve crime and help our community by keeping criminals out of town,” he said.
Although there are cases in which ALPRs have misread plates prompting officers to mistakenly detain drivers (DPD’s policy directs officers to check information before acting to avoid this), that’s not what seems to be behind Robinson’s concerns.
The accumulation of data is itself a threat, not because of how individual agencies like DPD use it – but because of how it could be used or misused.
“We have real concerns (around use by) Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the current political landscape right now,” Robinson said. “And while I don’t believe that that is necessarily Flock’s intention, and they are fairly clear about that, I don’t know that they have a ton of control around the intention of the entities that are contracting with them.”
Federal law enforcement doesn’t appear to have access to Durango’s Flock cameras, and DPD generally may not carry out immigration enforcement on behalf of federal authorities. However, National Public Radio has reported that ICE has added hundreds of thousands of administrative deportation warrants to the NCIC database, against which license plates captured by Flock cameras are checked.
Outside watchdogs have raised concerns that cities using ALRPs, like Durango, could become unwittingly complicit in federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Robinson doesn’t discount the utility of Flock cameras.
“We understand that there are some positives that come from the use,” he said.
However, he added, “from our perspective, the harm can very reasonably outweigh the good.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
