Flock is in the middle of a long losing streak. It’s one thing to lose hearts and minds via PR work. It’s quite another to lose actual dollars because you’ve lost a ton of hearts and minds by being on the losing end of mainstream media coverage for most the past two years.
If it bleeds, it leads, as every cop PR team knows. The problem for Flock is that it leads so often it’s bleeding customers, which has forced the company to finally start pitching some fixes rather than just pitching fits when confronted with (legitimate) criticism.
No longer able to ignore the bylined writing on the collective wall of US journalism, Flock stepped up to say it would do the bare minimum to stave off even more reporting on cops using its systems to stalk ex-wives, ex-significant others, the current partners of their ex-wives/significant others, protesters, critics, and anyone else officers wanted to take a peek at without having any legitimate law enforcement-related reason to do so.
In response to nationwide criticism, Flock Safety promised to make some optional features on-by-default. This announcement — paired with the outrageous claim that only Flock cared about police accountability — only raised more questions. Dropping the retention period to seven days made us wonder why that hadn’t always been on by default — especially when the company is collecting 20 billion plate reads per month.
Requiring case codes for searches should always have been the default, but only now seemed to be a thing Flock wanted to implement. The same thing goes for the newly announced “Audit Assistance,” which would allow interested agencies more control and oversight of searches performed by officers. Once again, we were forced to ask “why the fuck hasn’t this always been in place?”
The problems are no longer local. I mean, it’s still local agencies divesting themselves of Flock cameras and contracts, but even the those on Capitol Hill are starting to make noise about Flock, its pervasive surveillance network, and the apparently continual abuse by people in law enforcement who have access to Flock databases.
This congressional noise even includes Josh Hawley, who is perhaps best known for encouraging violent insurrectionists to continue with their insurrection — one that targeted his place of business but presumably wouldn’t target him personally.
So, it’s with that lump of presidentially pardoned salt that we take in this recent news: Hawley is all heated up about Flock and constant abuse of its systems by law enforcement. And Flock, for its part, is willing to make soothing noise in the general direction of Washington DC. Here’s the Wall Street Journal with the underwhelming details:
The Atlanta-based company has made changes to the information users provide when explaining their searches, Flock’s chief legal officer said in a letter to Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri. Flock has said its cameras scan about 20 billion plates a month. While users have always been required to justify their searches of the company’s database, the information was entered “in a free-text field,” yielding answers that weren’t always specific, the company said in the letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Flock has now added a drop-down menu with standardized categories modeled after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s data-reporting system. Law-enforcement searches will require a case number in order to conduct a search by the end of the year, although the system can be bypassed in an emergency, Flock said.
The only people who actually think a lack of accountability can be addressed — much less fixed — by a “drop-down menu” either work for Flock or the cop shops employing stalkers that just haven’t been caught yet.
Adding a case number field doesn’t really solve anything either, not if cops can bypass this supposed roadblock by typing anything from “lmao” to “jkjkjkjkjkjkj” in the field before proceeding with their illicit searches.
And it’s at this point that I start to side with Flock. A case number field only works if Flock knows which case numbers are valid (or, at the very least, follow case number nomenclature). Flock can’t because it’s something stapled on top of police stuff, rather than being intertwined from its genesis.
A drop-down menu may help classify searches should anyone decide to audit them, but all this really does is apply a veneer of legitimacy to illegitimate searches.
Flock’s failures to place location restrictions on searches (rather than just allow any local cop to search the entirety of Flock’s network) and limit data retention periods are on the company. That much it can definitely control. The other stuff it’s doing now means about as much as doing nothing, since the default settings can easily be overridden and most of the restraints are meaningless if law enforcement supervisors aren’t regularly checking search logs for anomalies like thousands of non-justified searches targeting certain plates or cops justifying their searches by hammering out some random letters until the “case number” field turns green.
Josh Hawley’s personal interest may be to ensure future pro-Trump insurrectionists arrive in DC without leaving a permanent Flock record behind. Then again, he may actually care about the issue he currently cares about, but I generally don’t trust anyone who thinks the civil liberties you should have access to depend largely on who you’ve voted for.
As for Flock, the best way out of this mess is probably the least profitable. It should be proactively terminating contracts any place officers have been criminally charged for abusing the system. It should also apply geofences to searches and require law enforcement agencies to enter agreements with agencies outside of their geofence to perform expanded searches. Finally, it should create contractual language that requires case management software cross-referencing. If cops aren’t willing to give Flock the information its needs to block unjustified searches, they shouldn’t be allowed to access Flock’s network and databases.
Tough times call for tough measures. Unfortunately, the last people willing to be tough are tech companies with shareholders to satiate with year-over-year growth and the law enforcement agencies which have steadfastly shown they’re unwilling to police themselves.
