Springfield City Councilor Zaida Govan unveiled a draft ordinance that would ban the city from acquiring, operating, funding or using Flock camera systems and would terminate all existing municipal contracts for them. The proposal lands amid a wave of Massachusetts communities reconsidering automated license plate readers, pitting privacy advocates against a police department that says the cameras have cracked real cases.
Govan said residents have raised valid concerns about the technology, telling constituents the push for a ban centers on how the data is stored with artificial intelligence and the privacy risks that come with it, according to MassLive. Her draft ordinance identifies the continuous capture of license plates, vehicle images, locations, dates and times from vehicles whose occupants are not suspected of any wrongdoing as a core problem, and it warns that aggregating and sharing that information can expose sensitive travel and association patterns. The proposal also flags network access, vendor control, cybersecurity risks and outside-agency access as threats to privacy, civil rights and public trust, and it specifically raises concern that information could be obtained by and shared with other departments without a warrant.
Residents have been demanding an end to Flock use in Springfield, and members of the group DeFlock Springfield, roughly a dozen of them, turned out for Thursday's subcommittee meeting. Govan unveiled her draft ordinance Thursday. DeFlock Springfield members have described alleged misuse elsewhere, including information being shared with ICE and officers using readers to track personal rivals, per the MassLive report.
Police Superintendent Pushes Back
Police Superintendent Lawrence E. Akers attended the same meeting with two officers and the head of the department's Real Time Analysis Center, Katherine Howland, and made the case for keeping the system in place. “This tool has been so helpful in community caretaking and solving crimes,” Akers said, according to MassLive. The department says it uses Flock cameras to recover stolen vehicles and investigate violent and gun crimes, and police have also used the system to locate a missing elderly driver.
Akers argued that properly used cameras are a great law-enforcement tool and urged residents and the City Council to focus on tracking camera use and strengthening safeguards rather than eliminating the system outright. Springfield police policies currently restrict camera-data access to authorized officers, who must supply either a report number or a service-call number before pulling footage, and the system is typically accessed by detectives and supervisors rather than patrol officers at large, the outlet reported.
Springfield has relied on license plate readers of various brands since 2011 and switched specifically to Flock cameras in 2023, according to Springfield Police Lt. Rick Viruet. Flock's director of public trust and technology, Max Weinstein, told MassLive that the city, not the company, owns the data collected and decides whether to share it. Weinstein said Flock has contracts with cybersecurity firms that continually audit the system for vulnerabilities and that the system does not allow recovery of data once it has been deleted, though he acknowledged no software company can guarantee its system is unhackable.
How Many Cameras Does Springfield Actually Have?
The exact scale of Springfield's camera network is unsettled. Western Mass News reported that more than 50 Flock cameras are currently posted across the city, while organizations cited by The Reminder, including mytownview.com and deflock.com, estimated the figure at about 50 ALPR devices in use. The two counts are not identical, and neither outlet's reporting reconciles the discrepancy.
Flock cameras record a static photograph of a vehicle's rear, its license plate, color, bumper stickers and roof racks, per the MassLive account. That kind of data collection has become increasingly controversial across the state over the past year, largely tied to concerns about how it gets shared. In April, a Texas police officer searched more than 4,800 Flock devices nationwide, including devices in Holyoke, and listed the reason as assistance to ICE, logging the search as “Immigration (civil/administrative) — ASSIST ICE,” according to The Shoestring.
A Statewide Reckoning Over Surveillance Cameras
Springfield is far from alone in weighing whether to keep its cameras. The Massachusetts ACLU chapter says about 40 communities statewide have already banned automatic license plate readers, including Easthampton and Greenfield, both of which ended their Flock Safety contracts this year amid resident privacy concerns, according to New England Public Media. The statewide count is about 40 municipalities that have rejected the cameras.
Boston's experience looms large in the debate. The city ended a five-month Flock pilot after discovering that a data-sharing function had been enabled despite a contractual agreement it would not be used, though Boston police continue to use automatic license plate readers from other companies. A subsequent Boston Globe report found that Flock allowed outside law-enforcement agencies to access Boston license plate data during the pilot, contrary to the city's wishes. Cambridge, meanwhile, terminated its own Flock contract after the company installed two cameras without the city's knowledge, which Cambridge officials characterized as a breach of trust, per the Boston Globe. New Bedford police have temporarily stopped using that city's 20 Flock cameras until sufficient safeguards are put in place.
Springfield's City Council plans to keep hashing out Govan's proposal at a subcommittee meeting scheduled for Nov. 17. What happens at that meeting, and whether the ordinance advances, is not yet known.
