Tyler-area residents learned more about Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras as Smith County Criminal District Attorney Jacob Putman and Melissa Beckett, Texas field director for Citizens for Renewing America (CFRA), discussed the pros and cons Tuesday.

Local conservative citizens organization, Grassroots America – We the People, invited two opposing perspectives to discuss Flock camera concerns with the local community during their regular monthly meeting at the Holiday Inn Tyler Convention Center from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Grassroots president and executive director JoAnn Fleming said the organization supports law enforcement but has concerns about potential privacy issues related to ALPRs, so the meeting served as an opportunity for community members to have an open discussion.

“We’re not talking about solutions tonight,” Fleming said. “We’re analyzing the problem and it’s going to be on a constitutional basis. We need to have a conversation where we talk to each other instead of yelling at each other and jumping to conclusions.”

What are Flock LPR cameras?

A Flock camera is an ALPR made by Flock Safety, an American manufacturing and operation technology company, that utilizes a solar-powered stationary camera to record vehicle license plates, make, model, color and unique features on the outside of the car with artificial intelligence, according to Flock’s website.

Flock’s website entails that cameras connect to the LTE mobile network and use computer vision, which processes digital images to produce numerical information that is sent to a central server. The server logs identifiable data that goes into a searchable database that compares all results to the National Crime Information Center, state and local police watchlists and flags and notifies law enforcement of any cars that match a car reported stolen or reported to be involved with criminal activity.

According to the Texas Privacy Coalition, a nonpartisan grassroots advocacy group, there are a claimed 76 mapped cameras in 10 cities in Smith County, with 40 cameras reported in Tyler.

Flock cameras can be bought and set up legally by any verified organization such as law enforcement agencies, local businesses, private security groups or registered homeowners associations (HOAs) and are not sold to individual customers.

Pro ALPR stance

Putman gave attendees a breakdown of the state’s Financial Crime Intelligence Center (FCIC), which is based in Tyler, that partners with the Smith County District Attorney’s Office and the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR).

“The center’s mission is to support law enforcement and businesses across Texas in combating financial crime and transactional organized crime,” Putman said.

Putman said the FCIC does not make arrests, but instead collects and analyzes intelligence, identifies suspects and criminal networks, helps local law enforcement build cases, trains officers to recognize financial-crime indicators and shares intelligence with banks, gas stations and other businesses.

“Intelligent criminal groups often travel throughout Texas and the U.S., and only stay in one spot, maybe an hour before they get in the cars and travel from city to city and across states,” Putman said. “If they are constantly moving, they’re harder to track and find, and so this is why centralized intelligence operations are so valuable.”

Putman said criminal activity increasingly involves transactional networks, with suspects from multiple counties.

“Investigators are in no way profiling people based on nationality, but when an organized crime occurs routinely and everyone happens to be from the same county, there are trends that arise because financial crime is an intelligent crime,” Putman said. “Specific countries train people and then send them over to the U.S. to carry out these crimes.”

Putman discussed trends from criminals from Romania, Venezuela, Cuba, Nigeria and China which included ATM jackpotting, gas-pump skimming, marketplace scams, organized credit card and fuel theft, government benefits and Social Security fraud, gift card scams and cryptocurrency-based scams.

“Criminals often convert stolen money into cryptocurrency because it can make it really hard to recover,” Putman said. “In some cases, the center has been able to trace and recover crypto before it moves through too many wallets, but it remains a very large challenge.”

The FCIC prevented a total loss of $725 million in damage to Texans and the Texas Economy from 2022 to 2026, Putman said.

Putman provided an example of a case that the FCIC was on that used surveillance intelligence, such as regular store cameras, that helped provide a lead for investigators to compile evidence for a warrant that ended up stopping a series of ATM skimming attacks in Dallas that would have stolen victims’ debit card pin numbers and information to drain accounts.

“I think the important thing to realize about Flock cameras and a lot of other evidence gathering tools law enforcement have is you don’t get arrested on that,” Putman said. “As I showed you in my example, there’s no way that those guys, who were very guilty of what they did, get arrested because their license plate and their car were identified. Flock is insufficient to arrest somebody because it’s not specific enough for law enforcement to take probable cause from that alone.”

Putman said Flock cameras do not replace investigators or human judgement and are different from red light cameras as it has no capability to send an immediate consequence for a flagged vehicle.

“Police have to independently verify that,” Putman said. “It is not sufficient for them to get a warrant for your arrest based on that kind of match and they have to actually do their normal jobs and go prove that it is the vehicle, but it helps with quicker leads.”

According to Flock, Flock customers including law enforcement cannot access live video feed directly from the cameras and will only have access to the regional database of flagged vehicles. All images are deleted after 30 days by default inside the cameras, unless law or an authorized investigation requires otherwise, data is encrypted so only authorized users can access it and customers, like law enforcement, own their own data and control access to it.

“Flock cameras are only allowed on public right-of-way areas that are outdoors and public for anyone to see,” Putman said. “Courts have ruled that license plates or vehicle descriptions displayed on public roads have no reasonable expectation of privacy because anyone can plainly see them, so that is why license plate readers do not violate the fourth amendment and do not require warrants.”

Putman also said if a resident’s car is not involved with a crime and never flagged, the cameras automatically delete that footage. He also mentioned that modern cell phones collect more routine and easily accessible data than almost any other technology.

“The things that your cell phone knows about you and sells about you is far beyond anything a license plate reader can know,” Putman said. “The phone itself, the apps you have on your phone are recording data, compiling data and making a ton of money to send that information to other people. If you’ve had that experience that we’ve all had where you had some sort of conversation and then later that day you get an ad for what you were talking about, that’s not a coincidence.”

Putman said people concerned about license plate readers are also often people who also have a smart phone with them at all times.

“We are very worried about surveillance, but we have all purchased very expensive surveillance devices and we make sure that it’s always charged and in our pocket,” Putman said.

Against ALRP

Beckett said the CFRA, which is a conservative advocacy group that partners with the Center for Renewing America, focuses on faith, family, individual liberty, property rights, limited government and law and order.

“I believe ALPR is mass surveillance of our society,” Beckett said. “With this surveillance technology it stores photographs, reads license plates, it will document your type of vehicle, even damage on your vehicle, and basically it comes up with a fingerprint for your vehicle.”

Beckett said she does not like how the cameras are marketed as just license plate readers, even though they collect full car identification and not just images of license plates.

“This is very broad on what types of things they could expand to include that would be within their patent,” Beckett said. “When Flock talks about their product they say how, for example, the police department or the sheriff’s department that has the contract with them to come put up the Flock cameras, now owns that data and we should own our own data.”

Beckett said she worries that although the cameras are stationary in one spot, once an individual city puts up a lot of them, they might be able to track someone from one spot to the next and share that data with other law enforcement agencies since they own the rights to the data.

“They could find a way to string those together which would be called a mosaic network,” Beckett said. “From that, the more networks that you connect to the...

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