PLYMOUTH — In the last four years, license-plate-reading cameras have helped Marshall County deputies solve a murder a case, prevent a possible child abduction and track down a registered sex offender traveling to the county to allegedly assault a minor.
“When you tell stories like that, it’s compelling how useful they can be,” said Jesse Bohannon, a Marshall County commissioner.
The county in 2021 approved and installed around 15 of the cameras operated by Flock Safety, a Georgia-based company founded in 2017 that manufactures and operates security hardware. Since then, officers have come to rely on the devices as a crucial crime-fighting assistant, Bohannon noted.
But that doesn’t mean he wants the cameras in his county. The Republican voted against them four years ago when he was a council member. Now, as a commissioner, Bohannon is advocating they be deactivated and removed.
His concern: Flock’s system has created a national surveillance network allowing police to access records that can create detailed map of citizens’ daily lives —where they sleep, work, worship and associate — all without their knowledge or consent.
That kind of tracking is ripe for government abuse and should require a warrant, Bohannon argued.
“I don’t blame law enforcement officers for wanting to have access to every tool that they can,” he said. “But, you know, there’s a reason why we have a Fourth Amendment.”
MOUNTING RESISTANCE
Bohannon is one of the growing number of Hoosiers who are pushing back against the surge of license-plate-reading cameras operated by Flock.
The company in 2020 started landing contracts with Indiana cities, counties and homeowner associations. Since then, more than 350 entities have signed on, including more than 260 law-enforcement agencies, according to Paris Lewbel, a public relations manager for Flock.
Today, more than 1,800 cameras line Indiana roadways in at least 80 of the state’s 92 counties, according to crowdsourced reports published on deflock.me, a project focused on documenting the large-spread use of the devices. The company would not release the total number of cameras installed in the state.
Nationally, Flock operates in over 6,000 communities across 49 states, managing thousands of cameras that perform billions of vehicle scans monthly, according to the company’s website. That data, by default, is stored for 30 days before it is deleted.
For Walker Lasbury, a 20-year-old DePauw University student studying economics, the sheer number of cameras is what piqued his interest in the technology. When he first started driving, there were just a handful in his hometown of Carmel. Today, over 110 devices can be found at every major intersection.
“I looked into it just out of curiosity, and I was astonished to find that there are absolutely zero laws at the state level protecting citizens from these cameras,” Lasbury said.
That led him in November to found Eyes Off Indiana, a nonpartisan nonprofit group working to establish clear, statewide limits on automatic license-plate-reader surveillance. In less than two months, 325 people have signed a petition calling for state oversight.
That movement to tamp down on license-plate readers is now gaining traction in Indiana.
This month, the Whiteland Town Council voted 3-2 not to sign a contract to install Flock cameras at a newly constructed roundabout, even though the money had already been budgeted, according to the Daily Journal of Johnson County.
Council members who opposed the cameras said they didn’t like the idea of the government monitoring innocent residents not subject to police investigations.
The Indiana ACLU is also lobbying for rules on how license-plate readers can operate in the state and pushing for strict limits on how long agencies can keep data before it’s purged, explained Samantha Bresnahan, the organization’s senior policy specialist.
“We’re talking about data on Hoosiers who have not committed a crime,” she said. “We do not view Hoosiers as potential criminals, and we don’t want data collected on them for a future alleged crime that’s also tracking their day-to-day movements.”
PATCHWORK REGULATIONS
Growing concern about Flock cameras isn’t just happening in Indiana. Cities in Illinois, Massachusetts, California, Oregon and Colorado have all recently voted to end contracts with Flock due to privacy right-concerns.
The Institute for Justice has filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents in Norfolk, Virginia, where over 175 Flock devices monitor vehicle movement. The suit argues the city’s surveillance of residents equates to an illegal search.
“If the city wants to track suspicious people, it can do what the police have always done: get a warrant,” the institute wrote in a release.
Despite the mounting resistance, only 16 states have passed laws regulating automated license-plate readers, and those rules vary drastically from state to state.
New Hampshire requires license-plate images to be deleted after three minutes unless they are related to an active police investigation. Arkansas allows data to be stored for 150 days.
Maine bans the use of most license-plate cameras except for narrowly defined law-enforcement reasons, and makes violating the policy a low-level misdemeanor. California has barred sharing state data with any federal or out-of-state agency.
In Indiana, the ACLU and Eyes Off Indiana are advocating for set limits on data retention and banning agencies from sharing license-plate data outside the state.
Both want mandated transparency rules that require agencies to detail exactly why a search is necessary for a specific vehicle.
But getting regulations passed could be an uphill battle. State lawmakers have tried at least three times to lay down ground rules for license-plate readers, only to see the legislation go nowhere.
Lasbury argued a major reason is pushback from law-enforcement officers, who highlight how hugely effective the cameras are at solving and preventing crimes.
A case in point: Just this month, a suspect in an Indianapolis homicide investigation was tracked down to a race track in Greene County by following the suspect’s vehicle using Flock cameras. The suspect was apprehended without incident.
“Any time you try and regulate a law-enforcement technology, there’s a fear that you’re infringing on their ability to protect the public,” Lasbury said.
The devices were also crucial in locating the suspect this month in the high-profile mass shooting at Brown University that killed two and injured nine.
Flock claims its cameras help solve over 700,000 crimes annually, representing about 10% of all reported crimes in the U.S.
Lasbury noted his group is working to find common ground with law enforcement agencies and legislators to craft a “workable” bill that allows the cameras to be used for public safety while also protecting Hoosiers’ right not to be tracked by the government.
‘COMMITMENT TO TRANSPARENCY’
Lewbel, the public relations manager for Flock, explained the company has no qualms with states or cities regulating their technology.
“Flock is strongly in favor of common-sense regulation that preserves the ability of law enforcement to use these highly effective technologies, while requiring the sorts of safeguards and accountability mechanisms communities expect,” he said.
The company already provides built-in transparency safeguards that every law-enforcement agency can opt in to, and each department can set detailed parameters on what kind of data can be shared across state lines or with other Indiana departments.
Every single search conducted in the Flock system is viewable in an agency’s “network audit” and available for regular oversight by command staff, elected officials and the public, explained Flock CEO Garrett Langley.
“This is part of our commitment to transparency and accountability from the beginning of the design process,” he wrote in a blog post.
Those built-in safeguards are being used by nearly every law enforcement agency in the state, including the 30-day default data purge, noted Lewbel.
It’s the reason the Zionsville Police Department decided to go with the company in 2020 to install around 10 license-plate readers in the city, explained Capt. Marius Klykken.
“When we looked at this, we really did our due diligence and weighed everything out there that was available to us,” he said.
Over the last four years, the cameras have been a game changer for officers, Klykken said. Nearly all crimes at some point involve a vehicle, and having cameras documenting license plates has significantly expediated the investigation process and rate of solved crimes, he explained.
That’s also been the case in Marshall County, noted Bohannon, the county commissioner who opposes the cameras.
But in his view, that isn’t enough to justify the devices tracking innocent Hoosiers’ vehicles and sharing that information with thousands of out-of-state agencies — all without any state law serving as a guardrail, he argued.
“If you gave every law enforcement department every bit of power that they wanted in order to effectively do their job, we would be living in a dangerous place,” Bohannon said.
“There’s a balance that has to be struck.”