For the police department

This page is about a vendor, not about your officers. Nothing on this site suggests anyone in the Deer Park Police Department has misused this system. The argument is that the contract leaves the department carrying risk the vendor created, without the written protections that would let you point to a rule when someone asks — and that ending it is a defensible professional decision, not a concession.

The premise

A department of Deer Park's size operates a Flock system with two trained officers, nine cameras, and no published governing policy.^1,2,3 We take it as given that the department adopted this tool in good faith to solve real problems — auto theft and hit-skip crashes, which is exactly what the November 2024 minutes describe the trial cameras helping with.⁴

Our disagreement is with the arrangement, not the intent. Four points below are the ones we would want to hear if we ran a police department.

1. The liability from a misread lands on the department, not the vendor

When a plate reader produces a false hit and a stop goes wrong, the defendant in the resulting lawsuit is the city and its officers.

Toledo is the case in point. A Flock camera misread a digit on a Dodge Ram and flagged it as stolen. The felony stop that followed involved a police dog injuring the driver's arm and several hours in custody.⁵ The City of Toledo — not Flock — paid $35,000 out of its Risk Management Fund to settle Upchurch v. City of Toledo.⁶

This is the structural problem: the vendor supplies the alert, and the city absorbs the consequences of the alert being wrong. In nearly two-thirds of the documented error cases nationally, the mistake was recognized only after officers had drawn firearms.⁷ Those are your officers, in your body camera footage, in a deposition three years later.

Worth noting from the same review: only about a third of documented errors were camera misreads. The rest were stale hotlist data or an officer misreading what the system returned.⁷ The Jackson Township, Ohio case involved a plate never removed from a hot list after the reason expired.⁵ That failure mode is a records-hygiene problem, and no camera upgrade fixes it.

2. No written policy means no defensible answer

The city publishes no ALPR policy — we checked every police department page, the contacts page, and the records policy on July 29, 2026.³ If one exists internally, it is not available to the public or, apparently, to council.

That is a professional exposure. When a resident, a reporter, a defense attorney, or a council member asks "what governs how this is used," the strongest possible answer is a written policy with a retention limit, an approved-use list, an audit requirement, and a review interval. The absence of one does not mean the department is doing anything wrong. It means the department has no document to point at when the question comes, and the burden of proof shifts onto individual officers' recollections.

Colerain Township, in the same county, adopted written ALPR Policy 5.40 in April 2025 with a 30-day retention cap.⁸ Dayton published its policy and impact statement — and its own review of its search logs is what uncovered roughly 7,100 immigration-related search requests from outside agencies, which is the point: a department that keeps and reads its logs can find its own problems.^9,10 Oak Park, Illinois published its general order, a camera location map, and a public list of approved crime categories — limiting ALPR use to violent stolen vehicles and carjacking, stolen plates, violent felonies, and missing or endangered persons, with anything further requiring written approval from the chief.^11,12

That Oak Park framework is a good one, and we would rather Deer Park adopt it than have nothing. Our position remains that the program should end — but a department that wanted to keep it should want this in writing more than anyone.

3. The vendor has made commitments about your data it did not keep elsewhere

This is the part of the record we would find most concerning as a chief.

Mountain View, California. The city's own bulletin reported that federal agencies accessed data from one of its cameras between August and November 2024, through a nationwide search setting that was "enabled without MVPD's permission or knowledge."¹³ A police department discovered after the fact that its data had left its control through a vendor-side setting.

Illinois, August 2025. The Secretary of State's audit of 12 agencies found Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois plate data, and ordered access shut off. Flock's own CEO acknowledged the company "didn't create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users," and that "some of our public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information."¹⁴

Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the city deactivated and removed 16 cameras in October 2025, Flock technicians installed two more in late November without the city's knowledge — which Flock attributed to an outstanding work order that should have been canceled. The city called it a "material breach of our trust and the agreement" and terminated.¹⁵

Cleveland. The city's public safety director told council in July 2026: "We are no longer involved in a national lookup," after reporting that immigration authorities had accessed the city's camera data without its knowledge.¹⁶

The common thread is that in each case the department did not know what had happened until someone outside told them. Deer Park's cameras already appear in another agency's Flock device list — that is how the Atlas of Surveillance obtained the count of nine.² Whether Deer Park is enrolled in any national lookup has never been stated publicly.

4. The device security record

The National Vulnerability Database lists 15 Flock Safety records, including two rated 9.8 of 10 — an unauthenticated Android application exposing administrative endpoints, and a bundled private key with a hardcoded password.¹⁷

Flock's response is that exploitation "would not only require physical access to a device" but "intimate knowledge of internal device hardware," and that "No customer action is required."¹⁸ The company registered the CVEs itself through MITRE, which is to its credit.¹⁸

We note only that physical access is a weaker mitigation for equipment on a public pole than for a server in a locked room, and that four of the 15 records concern gunshot-detection hardware Deer Park is not known to operate.¹⁷ The full detail is on our security page.

Separately, members of Congress wrote to the FTC in November 2025 reporting that the platform did not require multi-factor authentication and that more than 35 accounts were found with stolen passwords.¹⁹ For a two-officer deployment, account credential security is the whole perimeter.

What we are actually asking

We are asking the department not to seek renewal, and to support letting the contract lapse.

We recognize that is a real operational loss. The April 2026 minutes record the chief stating the cameras are helping with hit-skip reports, and we do not dispute that.²⁰ Hit-skip cases are genuinely hard to close without a plate.

What we would ask council to weigh against it is Oak Park, Illinois — the one jurisdiction the Institute for Justice found publishing routine ALPR reporting, which is why its numbers exist at all.⁷ Over six months with eight cameras: 373 investigative searches of residents' movement data, producing 2 stops — which did yield 4 arrests and 2 firearms recovered.^12,11 Both halves of that are real, and we will not quote the first without the second.

One honest caveat on that report, which we state everywhere we use it: its "no evidence whatsoever" finding rests on Oak Park's police department declining to give its own oversight committee outcome data, not on a study showing the cameras failed.¹² It is a finding about missing information. That is still the relevant point for Deer Park, which has published no numbers at all. The question is whether that ratio is the right trade for a city of 5,700, and Deer Park currently has no numbers of its own to answer it with.