City officials in North Richland Hills, a suburb of Fort Worth, asked a group to pay $2.3 million before fulfilling a public records request for Flock data. Officials claimed that searching about a terabyte of communications regarding errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system would require roughly 14 years of labor at $15 per hour. Phil Mynona filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of the Texas Privacy Coalition. Mynona told the Texas Tribune that the fee seemed ludicrous and designed to stifle public records searches.
Police misuse sparks public transparency demands
Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US. He noted that it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including Houston news station KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records.
These high price tags may hide data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras. Many cops have been found using the cameras to stalk strangers and people in their personal lives. Flock has yet to introduce meaningful reforms to confront its stalker cop problem.
Texas highlights how public transparency protects the public from invasive searches. An ex-Texas cop, Zachary Anthony Klein, pled guilty to 100 felony counts of misuse of official information. He agreed to this in exchange for the state not pursuing charges related to stalking several people. Klein and another officer's Flock abuse came to light after USA Today submitted a public records request that sparked a probe and his arrest. Disturbed by the case, Texas Governor Greg Abbott quickly halted Flock funding and stopped issuing permits.
State agencies attempt to block record requests
Additionally concerning are officials who deny requests outright. The Texas Department of Public Safety sought help from the Attorney General Office to allow it to withhold the entirety of Flock data that the Texas Tribune requested. That denial came after DPS had already responded to an identical request seeking data from prior weeks.
Flock maintains that its automated license plate readers are designed for public safety. Courts have largely agreed that cops can reasonably access Flock databases without infringing Fourth Amendment rights. However, ongoing cases show a widening web of privacy risks, including illegal police surveillance and bad actors improperly accessing data to track daily movements.
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Courts may start to rethink their stance on Flock. A federal judge in Oklahoma, Sara Hill, ruled that a cop conducted an unconstitutional search when querying a Flock database simply because a woman license plate was from California. Hill argued that the Flock network is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance creating a large-scale, dragnet-type surveillance system requiring a warrant to search.
A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that the company had nothing to do with the case. The company expects Hill ruling to be an outlier that will likely be appealed and overturned. Hill decision does not set any precedent, but it could be influential as one of the first to recognize that Flock searches can be unconstitutional.
404 Media reviewed audits showing there are currently more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month. Sometimes innocent people are arrested based on alerts. For the public scrutinizing Flock cameras, it is hard to know basic details like camera locations, viewers, access frequency, and storage duration. Public records requests help answer these questions. Police can also voluntarily share information using optional transparency portals built by Flock.
Flock spokesperson Andrew Smith told the Texas Tribune that the portals give agencies a public-facing way to publish information about their programs. Very few agencies opt in to sharing. In Texas, hundreds of agencies use Flock cameras, but only 59 agencies use transparency portals, and just 16 share data with the public.
Michael Soyfer, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice who studies Flock camera abuse, suggested that without transparency, Flock may end up building tools supporting police misuses. Without courts requiring warrants or officials demanding transparency, Flock cameras will continue tracking movements in ways the public does not fully understand.
