by Sam Silva ’28 on October 1, 2026
Opinion
1984, a novel by George Orwell, features the infamous Big Brother and totalitarian regime. 1984 highlights a country under mass surveillance, with its citizens having zero freedom due to constant watch. I cannot be the only person who has seen an abundance of articles about Flock cameras. If you have not heard about Flock Safety, let me give you some context. Flock cameras, more broadly known as LPR or ALPR cameras, which stands for automated license plate recognition, are sprouting up across the United States. A question has emerged from the rise of these cameras: are U.S. citizens being unlawfully watched?
I want to start by highlighting two sides of this debate: supporters believe that Flock is a vital resource to stop violent crimes, whereas adversaries believe that Flock invades their privacy and infringes on their personal freedom. Both are warranted in their beliefs. While LPRs can be used to solve legitimate crimes, where is the line drawn for the average citizen?
Earlier this month, a football player from UMass Dartmouth was stabbed right in Providence. Flock was used to track the car of Chukuwnonoso Uzoma Eze, another UMass student, out of the parking lot where the altercation happened. The license plate readers were a pivotal force in locating Eze, and he was eventually taken into custody by Massachusetts police. On the other hand, in May, a Texas cop searched through the LPR databases to find a woman who had self-administered an abortion. The officer in Texas searched the Flock database and gave the reason “had an abortion, search for female,” as Flock requires users to provide a reason whenever searching through the database. In this case, the woman’s family had called the sheriff’s office because they were worried about her bleeding to death. After two days, the sheriff’s office was able to contact the woman and verify that she was okay. They used Flock technology to look outside of this local area and into other local communities and states .
These situations all raise the same question about LPRs: is “safety” a valid enough reason to surveil? In the case of the stabbing in Providence, you could say Flock was necessary and that this is reason enough to employ more LPR cameras. Whereas a woman living in a state with the strictest abortion laws who illegally gets an abortion could be tracked, which, in my opinion, seems like an overreach of the law. Here’s the biggest problem I foresee with LPRs: there is really no federal regulation. Each local and state government can employ the cameras however they see fit. What does that mean in circumstances like tracking outside of your local borders, where different states have different laws? What state trumps the other? What about misuse of Flock? In Georgia, at least 20 officers have been arrested after abusing their access to these cameras. In many circumstances, these officers were stalking past or prospective partners. In a press conference, the Georgia senator called on the federal government to add some guardrails to this system.
“Right now, there are no federal policies to punish or even track when one of the 140,000 law enforcement officers across the country with access to license plate tracking data misuses that information, and unfortunately, we’ve seen dozens of cases of women being stalked by ex-boyfriends or husbands who have been given unrestrained access as law enforcement officers to this surveillance technology,” Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock said.
I think for Flock and other ALPR systems to be trusted, we need some serious regulations passed at the federal level. Like many Americans, Democrat or Republican, I am worried about how Flock could be used negatively. And with the absence of any federal regulation, that worry seems very valid.