Full transcript
So, I hate to tell you, but you might be
getting flocked, as in f l o ced d.
Flocked. Across the country, there is a
new kind of surveillance taking place.
It is an estimated 100,000 cameras
recording cars, where they go, what they
look like, when they pass by. All of
this is creating searchable records of
everyday Americans movements. It is what
happens when you get flocked. It is a
reference to Flock Safety, the largest
provider of automatic license plate
readers in the United States. These
plate readers are pretty unassuming.
They're often um attached to utility
poles like that and street lights that
line highways and neighborhoods and
parking lots. But these are not your
your standard traffic cameras. They
don't enforce speeding or red light
stops. When you drive past uh past a
plate reader like a Flock, it creates
what is known as a digital fingerprint
of your vehicle. According to Flock
Safety, check this out. information like
license plate, make, model, color, and
other visible characteristics like bike
racks, trailers, or tool boxes. That's
what it includes. Um, timestamp, GPS,
pinned, and captured. All of it without
notification. You've got no idea it's
going down. Then an AI algorithm
categorizes the information and they put
it into a massive database. The Guardian
says it offers nationwide search
capability for law enforcement agencies
that that opt in to share all of this
data, which Flock told Congress is about
75%
of its law enforcement customers.
According to Flock Safety, that data is
stored up to 30 days unless these local
law enforcement agencies require it
otherwise. And supporters say that those
plate readers help solve crimes.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Chicago
Justice Podcast. I'm your host Tracy
Cysa, executive director of the Chicago
Justice Project and adjunct professor in
the department of justice law,
criminology, and security at American
University.
This is episode one of a series on flack
safety, known for their incredibly
dispersed throughout this country,
automated license plate readers or
ALPRs.
So, what do these machines capture?
They capture partial or full license
plate, car make, model, color, unique
attributes like roof rack, bumper
stickers, dents. It's basically a
fingerprint for your car.
They can more or less map your
movements. So, it's not like they're
following you around, but when they're
so frequently throughout the community,
they can basically piece together where
you're going, what time you went, what
route you took. So like how you commute
back and forth from work possibly, what
religious institutions you frequent and
when bars, restaurants, political
offices, political gatherings, shopping,
all of that is identifiable,
through these readers. Flock, if you
look on their website, will tell you
they have a 100,000
automated license plate reader cameras
deployed throughout the US.
That's an unbelievable amount of number
uh unbelievable number of cameras being
deployed. Again, think about the
information they capture.
So today, where are we focusing? We're
focusing on the state of Wisconsin. Our
guest, John McCrae Jones, a policy anal
an analyst with the American Civil
Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
Next week, we sit down Professor Steve
Kenir from Christopher Newport
University to discuss his and his
colleagues new paper, Surveillance,
Inequality, Race, Poverty, and the
Geography of Automated License Plate
Reader Deployment. Now, you're not going
to be shocked, ladies and gentlemen, but
there's a consistency about where these
cameras are deployed. And some may have
it throughout their entire city, entire
all the communities, but when that's not
the case, they're segregated
into specific communities. We know what
those communities are. They're
communities of color, right? That's why
you're listening to this podcast. You
already know that. Anyways, let's get to
the conversation with Mr. Jones about
what's going on in Wisconsin and he'll
inform us a little more about the
details about how these work. I'll be
back with you after the conversation.
John McCrae Jones, thank you so much for
jumping into the podcast. We really
appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. I would looking
I've been looking forward for this
conversation.
Great. Do my do my audience a favor.
What is an automated license plate
reader or ALPR system and how do they
work?
So, the best way of how
Best way to understand an automated
license plate reader is to think of it
as facial recognition for your car. So,
an automated license plate reader does
so much more than just scans your
license plate. It records the make, the
model of your car, the color. I can pick
up things can pick up on things such as
dents, uh, bumper stickers, whoever's
driving the car. And the real
selling point for automated license
plate readers and what makes them so
scary is the fact that it logs the
location of everywhere where your car is
spotted. So basically over the course of
30 days or months, it can create a log
of everywhere that you go inside a
certain location inside your city. So if
every day you go to work or every day
you go to the grocery store or every day
you go to church, it logs you going to
those locations and it builds a pattern
of your movements. And not to jump ahead
in the conversation, we've already seen
how this data has been abused by law
enforcement who use this information to
stalk their partners. Like we've had
three cases in Wisconsin already,
right? Right. And that was what I was
going to get to about
why an average person an average person
in Wisconsin should be should be worried
about this or suspicious of the
technology. And I think you hit right on
it. Um and I'm hoping you can talk about
a little more. It can actually map your
movements and patterns like if you go to
a certain store or if you're at work,
what hours you're at work. I mean, it
can actually kind of create a a track a
pattern of where you're driving and
where you where you're spending your
time.
Exactly. And I think the issue is that
people don't understand how much of
their personal information is collected
by tracking your movement patterns. What
I would like to say is that if you can
track where I go and know the locations
that I
that I visit a lot of the times, you
know, more information about John McCrae
as an individual, about my friends,
about the political groups that I'm a
part of, about the social circles I run
in, about the gym that I go to, where I
spend my night life. than you would know
if you had a warrant and you searched my
home. You would know more information
about my about me from tracking my
movements than you would know from
actually searching the where I live. And
the reality of the situation is the omni
potent knowledge of where an entire city
is moving all the moving all the time
and their movement patterns. That's
basically the information that like
that's the power of a god. That's
information that only God would have.
And when you trust that to individual
officers without
the right measures for accountability,
transparency,
and punishments for misuse, you're
basically asking too much. It's a
disservice to the officers to ask them
to personally hold back their personal
ambitions and not to misuse these
technologies. Not to mention, that's
before we get into the conversation of
big systemic misuses by either the
federal government, police departments
as a whole, or private corporations.
And that's where I was going to go. So,
let's there I think I read something
like there's 200 police departments or
something like that in Wisconsin using
this license plate reader, but in
Wisconsin, it's flak mostly of what's
used. It's a that's a um that's a
company that sells this technology.
[snorts] Not all of it, but a you know a
certain percentage of it. So do police
officers let's say for instance
Milwaukee
when a Milwaukee officer goes to search
the flock database
are they only able to search the data
that is collected within the
jurisdiction of Milwaukee? Can they does
the database allow them access to all
the flock data through Wisconsin or
maybe all of the data throughout all the
jurisdictions where flock is across the
country?
So what makes flock valuable is the
access to the data set. So
the reality of the situation is we don't
know the scope of which how many law
enforcement officers has access to what
departments. And when I mean what
departments, I'm not just talking about
the 200 plus departments in Wisconsin.
We're talking about the thousands of law
enforcement departments that use Flock
nationwide. Not to mention, it's used by
homeowner associations, private
businesses, uh, and the federal
government. So, we we don't know the
scope at which an individual officer has
the power to search the movements of
basically a nationwide scale. And that's
the scary part about the technology is
the unknown power that we're giving
individuals.
All right. So, let's um John wrote a
piece on the ACLU's website and there's
a bunch of news about flock, but I I'll
link to that in the show notes. And I
looked up uh and I'm going to try to
pronounce this. Wawatusa,
the city in Wisconsin.
Thank you so much.
They did about 10,000 searches in 2025.
Let that sink in. this this municipal
police department. About 2,000 of them
were without really a reason. It was
listed as investigation, whatever the
hell that means, right? But this is
where it gets really scary. Wawaossa has
91 sworn officers.
91. And they did 10,000 searches in a
year.
That would be 115 searches approximately
per officer throughout the course of the
year. That meant every single officer in
the department was running like 10
searches a month.
Go ahead. And the scariest part about
that is we don't know what they're
searching. So in in Watossa and in
Wisconsin more generally the most common
search is a one-word term such as
investigation
that doesn't further describe what law
enforcement is investigating. So you
basically have tens of thousands of
searches happening across the across the
state of Wisconsin and even inside the
small city of Wawaossa. I mean even
calling Wawsa city is an exaggeration.
It's a small suburb outside of uh
Milwaukee. So, you basically have tens
of thousands of statewide searches that
we don't know what they're searching,
what they're using it for. Are we using
it are they using it to stalk their
romantic partners? Are they using it in
collaboration with immigration searches?
Are they use it are they using it
because they found someone attractive
while working a private job and then
wanted to later pull them over for being
attractive? Mind you, that's a real case
out of Florida. I think it was Monroe
County. There was a officer who was
working as a private security on a TV
set, found one of the extras attractive,
ran her license plate, pulled her over
later when he's in uniform, and
allegedly uh when she was asked why I
was pulled over, there was something
along the lines of I found you
attractive. So, that's the issue with
these one-word justifications for
searches. We don't know what they're
searching. And we've already had three
cases in Wisconsin this year where law
enforcement officers were arrested uh
for using automated license plate
readers to stalk a romantic interest.
And this I think there's 16 cases or 14
cases that happened nationwide. What
puts Wisconsin at about 20% of of cases
that we know of where law enforcement is
using automated license plate readers to
track a romantic partner.
Right. And Wisconsin's not unique. So,
we know it's happening other places. It
just means for some reason they're
getting caught more in Wisconsin than
they are in other places. There's no
way. There's just happened to be a
unique set of corrupted or whatever. um
police officers in Wisconsin. I don't
think they're any different anywhere
nationwide. Um they have the goods
probably the same percentage of good and
bad officers. So I just think that's I
think that's more of a more relevant as
the fact that you're just not catching
them in other states. Okay. Where did
you
let me back up and say how much of the
information
about the use of flock is open for
public dis uh access and how did you get
the information about Wabaossa?
That's a complicated question. The
reason why it's complicated is that
there's so
little policy and law that regulates
transparency around automated license
plate readers and surveillance
technology tools. Uh,
more generally, how I found out or how a
lot of us found out about the Wawa Tossa
number and the greater scope of how
automated license plate readers,
particularly specifically flock, is
being used in the state of Wisconsin
comes from the reporting of Isaiah
Holmes at the Wisconsin Examiner.
earlier, I believe this year or late la
later last year, he dropped this
bombshell article that basically spells
out how flock is being operated in the
state of Wisconsin. And I think that's a
huge issue is that we don't know what or
how law enforcement is using fly. And
really, this oversight or interest in
how law enforcement are using these
surveillance technologies are something
that's relatively new.
Okay. So, I'm sure there's other
surveillance technologies being used in
Wisconsin, Shot Spotter and probably
others. Is Flack unique in the lack of
public disclosure and access and what
you know about them or is this systemic
to all these surveillance technologies?
This is systemic. Um, if you want, I can
run a list of surveillance technologies
that we know that we're using inside the
city of Milwaukee. Uh, so like you
mentioned, there's Shot Spotters. Uh,
we're pouring millions of dollars into
this technology. It's supposed to be a
gunshot detection system.
So, in theory, it works by a gunshot
happens inside of a neighborhood. Uh the
Shot Spotter microphone picks it up and
then law enforcement rushes to the scene
of the crime and doesn't have to worry
about
waiting for a 911 call to find out about
the details of the potential shooting.
The issue with Shot Spotter is it
doesn't work.
The reality is construction sites,
fireworks, car backfiring
all trigger this technology to the point
where a lot of times law enforcement AC
across the country ignore the alerts
because they're they're wrong so often
of the time. So, we're pouring tons of
money into microphones that are
predominantly in black and brown
neighborhoods in the city of Milwaukee.
Wired recently had an article, I think
it was about a year ago, where there's a
shot spotter leak of where these loc or
where these microphones are are and
almost all of them are predominantly in
black and Latino neighborhoods.
Milwaukee is
segregated
very much along racial lines where if
you say African-Americans, if this is
the city of Milwaukee, African-Americans
live here, uh, Latino people live here
and then white people live here.
African-American and Latino
neighborhoods were sex traded with
sought spotters here across the river
where most of the white residents live.
There's basically none. So, we have
microphones all over black and brown
communities. Uh we use social media uh
an analysis which basically scans social
media, people's personals, Instagrams
and Facebook pages uh on a mass scale
oftent times without warrants. uh facial
recognition technology, which I'm sure
most people are aware of.
Uh stingrays, which are a really
interesting technology that can't be
used targeted by design. Do you want me
to go into details about stingray or am
I going too far off on a tangent?
No, no. I get I think we're good. I'm
going to get into a separate episode.
So, let's let's talk a little bit about
the misconduct that's happened. I'm
going to go with Officer Hose Aala.
Yep. from from Milwaukee charged with
one count of misdemeanor attempted
misconduct in public office. We'll get
to the fact I don't know how he's
charged with so little uh of a crime. He
ran his partner's license plate
124 times in the flock database.
Yep.
And his and her part and his partner's
ex 55 times.
Yep.
before anyone discovered what was going
on. What does that say about the
accountability of like the misuse of the
system that he could do it 180 times
before he gets caught?
So the most important thing is that Jose
Ayalo wasn't caught by flock or the city
of Milwaukee. So both like to talk about
the local auditing and safeguard systems
that they have. The reason why Ayala got
caught was the partner
previously or had the inclination that
Ayala was stalking her and she ran her
license plate on this website called
Have I Been Flocked before and then
alert law enforcement.
So Milwaukee Police Department or Flock
didn't catch him. So, God knows if she
didn't do that search herself, God knows
how long he could have gotten away with
doing these searches on her and
hers. I believe another person
affiliated with her before being caught.
And the other thing that I want to point
out is imagine how many people
specifically romantic interests of law
enforcement. How many women are
currently being stalked who doesn't know
that the have I been flocked website
exists and doesn't have the foresight to
search their license plate
to catch the officer who's stalking
them. And I think that's the important
thing is that Ayala is probably not
he's probably not special or the other
two officers in Wisconsin. It's just
that we don't have the mechanism and the
infrastructure and the proper
transparency and auditing systems to
catch the other officers who are abusing
the system.
All right. Well, let's talk about
another one real quick. So, Greenfield
Police Chief Jay Johnson
facing felony charges for ordering the
installation, now this isn't flock, but
it's the misuse of surveillance
technology,
ordering the installation of police
surveillance cameras outside his home
during divorce proceedings with his
wife. And then he just recently, not too
long ago, picked up new charges for
destroying evidence after wiping his
cityowned phone remotely. So, what kind
of accountability could there be for
their surveillance technology when the
chief of police is the one misusing it?
And I also think
he's not special either. There's been
multiple police chiefs that have been
charged with misusing surveillance
technology to stalk people. And that
goes back to the point that I talked
about earlier is that surveillance
technology, the information that it can
provide an individual is the equivalent
of information that is
biblical proportion. And we're asking
officers from everyday beat cops to
deputies to police chiefs to
have the self-control
to wrangle in their own personal
ambition. And I think that's a
disservice to the officers themselves
because police officers at the end of
the day are human. And if you give
humans unchecked power,
we abuse it. That's who we are. That's a
lesson that we've learn known since the
days of Babylon.
So FL isn't special.
The other what the other surveillance
technologies aren't special. What's
special is the power and the amount of
data that is being collected right now
that is available to individuals. And
how we stop that is one we don't collect
the data in the first place. That's the
most important thing that we can do. But
if we must collect this data, we have
different mechanisms for transparency,
auditing and punishments for misuse.
Okay, we're going to go over No, before
I do this, I want to go just so you
know, ladies and gentlemen, other
misuse, right, of surveillance
technology,
Orange City, Florida, Sedick, Kansas,
present, Georgia, if I'm pronouncing
that right. In Kansas and Georgia, it
wasn't a beat cop. It was police chiefs
that were busted for misusing the
technology. And it just goes to the
heart of, you know, our police
departments in America operate on trust
us. We're worthy of your trust. Trust
us. Wait a minute. It took me about 20
minutes of research to find that at
least three police chiefs throughout the
country have used surveillance
technology for their own goods. And it's
always
it seems like almost always a misuse by
males looking to surveil their partners
or their soon to be ex partners or the
exes of their current partners. It
always has some romantic
connection. I guess those
person
found attractive.
Yeah.
Exactly. Right. But that was also
romantically sexually related. Right. At
the same
that is scary. the fact that you
that women have to worry about oh my god
are these security guards where I'm
working cops and is one of them going to
find me attractive so much that they're
illegally going to use this police
database to search and find out not only
where I live and all that stuff but
everywhere I go and the times I go there
that is just scary as hell and and it
when you take that in context it kind of
ruins the old not that it hasn't been
ruined for decades trust us.
Um, it does.
I I've always been a proponent of the
fact that you prove to us like the the
city council should say before you adapt
any technology, give us all the science,
prove it works, how we going to evaluate
it every year, what are the controls,
and every year it has to be re
reapproved
after it gets audited by the inspector
general from the city or something. All
these technologies should be that way.
Do you mind if I pitch something to you
real quick?
Yes, absolutely. exactly what you're
talking about. So, the ACLU's affiliates
and national across the country have
been pushing uh this local ordinance
called community control over police
surveillance or cops. I don't know if
you've heard of cops before because what
you described is exactly that. Basically
what CCAPS does is every existing
surveillance technology that law
enforcement within that jurisdiction is
using and all future surveillance
technology that will ever be used must
come in front of the local elected
officials that that is their oversight
go to whatever is their equivalent of a
public safety um committee and pitch why
they need to use this technology. And
then it gives people in the community a
chance to say, "Hey, we don't want these
surveillance technologies in our
neighborhoods or allows people in the
community to say,"Hey, we're willing to
give this a shot. We do want this if it
actually has all the benefits of
stopping crime that it claims it does."
Most of the time, these surveillance
technologies don't live up to their
claims of stopping crime. But if someone
if the community says, "Hey, we do
support it." Then first the elected
officials who are members of that
specific committee votes on if they're
going to to pass the technology to the
greater uh council and the greater
council approves it. Then law
enforcement is allowed to use that
specific technology
for a year and at the end of the year
law enforcement produces this report
that says hey this is the surveillance
technology. This is what it does. This
is how it was used. These are who were
target targeted by the technology. And
if it was targeted in specific
neighborhoods or against specific
communities or different groups, this is
why. Who has access to this technology?
Is this data being shared with just
local law enforcement? Is this data
being shared with ICE? Is is this data
being shared with law enforcement across
the country? [snorts] This is how much
money taxpayers have spent on this
technology.
And this is its impact on crime and
public safety. So then it allows elected
officials who are
respons more responsive to their
community and can be voted out in a way
that a lot of times police chiefs can't
to say, "Hey, we're going to use this
technology again. We're going to invest
more taxpayer money in it or we're not."
Because a lot of times the process now
of determining what surveillance
technology is used or not used, how much
privacy is traded or not traded by
communities is solely defying or decided
by law enforcement itself with no
measures of accountability or
communication to the greater local
officials who are more who are voted in
by the constituents and the people who
are directly impacted by these
technologies. And a counterargument that
we hear a lot of times are, well,
doesn't the local city council control
the budget? Yes. But a lot of times
these technologies are originally
procured through donations or grants and
then once they're already in use, then
they get grandfathered in into the
general police budget or they're listed
under other things inside the police
budget. And because
there's not an elected official in the
world who has time to pick through every
nook and cranny of a gigantic city
budget, these things creep through. So a
city cops makes elected officials have
to face the music and address the
surveillance technologies head on.
Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, it's
just so sad. So before we wrap up, I
want to run two stats by you and get
your I looked at Flock's website today.
Here's one claim.
Astounding that any organization would
put this on their website.
10% of reported crime in the US is
solved using flock technology.
Interesting.
Probably BS. Like that is a wow claim to
make.
I know. And I looked at that and I'm
like,
"Wow." Like
I I [clears throat] don't know. Like I
mean, what crime? What type of crime? I
I don't know. I I was shocked by the
fact that they would have that on their
website. But they also had this. A
typical agency, I guess, police
department that acquires an additional
one flack device per sworn officer may
expect
a 9%
increase in clearance rates. That was
that was the word that really hit me was
May.
Typical in May is just what what do
those terms mean? They don't mean
anything. They're vague enough where you
can make these type of claims. The one
thing I do want to say that's really
interesting that Fly probably doesn't
want to talk about is how their
databases are were used by a law
enforcement department in Texas to
search law enforcement in Wisconsin uh
to help investigate a crime. Do you know
what that crime was? They're
investigating if a woman was having an
abortion or not. So those are the types
that flock is helping to solve.
Oh god. Let's leave it there. Wow.
That's that's that's reason enough to
end the technology. All right,
John McCrae Jones, thank you so much for
joining us. We really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me. I
really appreciate it.
That was John McCrae Jones, policy
analyst with the American Civil
Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
The technology is scary. The misuse is
frightening.
Police assume
that they've earned the public's trust,
that they haven't misused every possible
single advancement in technology and
firepower and weapons that they've been
given. They haven't misused every single
one. You go look in Chicago, they misuse
shotguns. That was like the first big
advancement. And they've misused to one
extent or another every technology and
surveillance technology, whatever it is.
And they've misused every single
advancement in firepower. They always do
it. It's incredible.
And somehow someway the politicians
keep giving them more without
restraining them.
Brian, as as Mr. Mr. Jones said,
this is being misused by officers within
the department. It's not like, hey, that
data went out to Witchah, Kansas, you
know, and it shouldn't have. And this is
being misused
by officers in the community.
And unfortunately, it
like everything in America, it's being
misused frequently by men in power to
surveil, harass
the women in their lives or the women
they want in their lives. Um, it's a sad
consistency in America. It's
used against the poor, the disadvantaged
comm and in America that means mostly
communities of color or the women in
their lives.
those two things,
right? Um, so we'll be back next week
with Professor Stephen Keenir to discuss
that. The week after we're going to talk
about the resistance to
these cameras, that image I showed you
earlier is from an organization or a
group called DFLAC where they're trying
to crowdsource where these cameras are.
And they've used some I think data
they've gone through FOYA and they've
got they use data from um people who
self-report where these cameras are to
kind of give us an ability you you can
go to DLOC online and check out if you
have any around you and then you can map
out where they are. Um so that'll be um
two weeks from today hopefully. So thank
you again for being here. We really
appreciate it. We'll see you next week
with our discussion with uh Professor
Steve Kenir. Thanks for staying with us
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