Threat or menace? Police abuses of Flock’s spycams renew a simmering debate over their use.

A little more than a year ago, I wrote about an independent journalist who exposed a secretive contract with Flock Safety, a surveillance company that has been all over the news in recent weeks.

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Town officials in the wealthy suburb of Scarsdale, New York, had signed a $2.1 million contract that placed the community under surveillance in the name of public safety. Protests by local activists, along with dogged reporting by Joanne Wallenstein of the digital news outlet Scarsdale 10583, led to the cancellation of the contract just months after it had gone into effect.

But you can’t keep a bad idea down. As Yogev Toby reported in The Boston Globe last Friday, police officers in Lynn, Stow and New Bedford have been placed on leave or fired after they were caught using the streetside cameras to stalk ex-girlfriends and engage in other outrageous behavior. There’s now a database where you can enter your license plate to see if you’ve been spied on.

Flock claims that its technology has helped track down everything from stolen cars to missing people. But in response to a surge of uneasiness about the technology, Flock has unveiled new policies that cut down on data retention and give “customers” (that would be the 5,000 or so law-enforcement agencies and 1,000 businesses which which it has agreements) more control. Flock also wants you to know that it does not do business with Palantir Technologies, which works with ICE and the military.

Last November, Flock came to Brookline, the sort of affluent, well-educated Massachusetts suburb where you might think the arrival of Big Brother would spark an outcry. If it did, it was muted. In retrospect, it seems that what happened in Scarsdale was an outlier, but perhaps the rising controversy over the risks of empowering police officers to spy on their ex-girlfriends will change that.

In fact, now they’re everywhere in Massachusetts. According to MyTownView, which compiles government data, there are currently 1,240 Flock cameras watching us in more than 160 cities and towns.

A final note: Flock is not to be confused with ShotSpotter, a separate technology that tracks the location of gunshots. That, too, has proved controversial. As Tavishi Chattopadhyay reports in Cambridge Day, that city shut down ShotSpotter earlier this year only to turn it back on amid complaints that local officials were depriving police of a vital public safety tool.

Questions have been raised as to how well ShotSpotter works and whether it has been used to violate civil liberties, especially in Black and brown communities. Those are genuine concerns. But its intended purpose certainly seems more defensible than Flock’s, which is to spy on everyone because, well, you know, it’s for our own good.

More: Here’s a great Wall Street Journal article about the growing national backlash against Flock.