The surveillance state has come to Brookline, Massachusetts. Sam Mintz reports for Brookline.News that Chestnut Hill Realty will set up license-plate readers on Independence Drive near Hancock Village, located in South Brookline, on the Boston border. The readers are made by Flock Safety, which is signing an agreement with the Brookline Police Department to use the data. The data will also be made available to Boston Police.
Two months ago I wrote about a campaign to keep Flock out of the affluent community of Scarsdale Village, New York. The story was covered by a startup local website, Scarsdale 10583, and after a period of months the contract was canceled in the face of rising opposition. Unfortunately, Scarsdale Village is the exception, as Flock Safety, a $7.5 billion company, has a presence in 5,000 communities in 49 states as well as a reputation for secretive dealings with local officials.
Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub reports that the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2020 that automated license-plate readers are legal in Massachusetts. Gaffin also notes that, early this year, police in Johnson County, Texas, used data from 83,000 Flock cameras across the U.S. in a demented quest to track down a woman they wanted to arrest for a self-induced abortion. Presumably Texas authorities could plug into the Brookline network with Flock’s permission.
Mintz notes in his Brookline.News story that Flock recently opened an office in Boston and that its data has been used by police in dozens of Massachusetts communities. He also quotes Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts as saying that though such uses of Flock data as identifying stolen cars or assisting with Amber Alerts isn’t a problem, “Unregulated, this technology facilitates the mass tracking of every single person’s movements on the road.”
The cameras could also be used by ICE in its out-of-control crackdown on undocumented (and, in some cases, documented) immigrants. This is just bad news all around, it’s hard to imagine that members of the public would support it if they knew about it.