Without public notice, the unblinking eye of Flock Safety came to South Windsor in April 2025 to begin its 24/7 mission of uploading images of every vehicle passing by a few chosen spots. Artificial intelligence cataloged license plates and other details into a searchable, privately-controlled data base.  The unheralded arrival of Flock’s automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, was typical of a company that had rapidly, and mostly quietly, amassed a network of 120,000 cameras in 49 states. Eighteen months later, the ground has shifted, and Flock is Exhibit A in a reckoning over AI and surveillance.  Kristian R. Lindstrom, the police chief who brought Flock’s cameras to South Windsor with an informal endorsement by the previous town council, glumly watched Monday night as the current council passed a resolution directing him to cease their use immediately and arrange for removal within 60 days. South Windsor, a suburb of 26,000 with a crime rate nearly 90% lower than the national rate, is at least the sixth Connecticut community to end or suspend the use of ALPRs this year, following Windsor, Killingworth, Ledyard, Milford and Newtown. The story of Flock in South Windsor follows a narrative seen elsewhere: A backlash erupts over the realization Flock is in their community, followed by a debate over risk vs. reward: Is sacrificing a measure of privacy for a promise of greater public safety a fair or Faustian bargain?  “There’s a trade-off between freedom and security, and everyone decides individually where they fall in that trade-off,” Lindstrom, a South Windsor cop for 29 years and the last six as its chief, told the council at a hearing last month. “I know where I fall.” It is how Garrett Langley, the chief executive and co-founder of Flock, framed the issue in an upbeat TED talk recorded six months ago, when his company was growing and contract terminations still were rare. It was titled, “Can a camera on every corner make us safer?” Langley told the story of an 11-year-old girl kidnapped from her grandmother’s home in Tennessee in the middle of the night, and how a detective recalled the Flock camera near the woman’s house. Only one car had passed, headed towards I-75 and Georgia. The tag was on a car registered to a sex offender. “Now that girl is alive today because the detective had two things: he had a license plate and he had a direction to travel,” Langley said. “This, for me, is one of thousands of stories I sadly hear about every day in America.” Langley described his 9-year-old company as the answer to what he sees as a simple data problem, a means to strip the anonymity of movements across the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. by creating a sortable, searchable record. “This is the problem,” Langley said. “You literally can commit a crime in city A and drive to city B, and they’re like, ‘Oh, who are you?’ You leave state A to state B, and they’re like, ‘Oh, we have no record of you.’ This entire problem is a data problem.” The data problem is solved. In much of America, there is a record of people now. Three-quarters of Connecticut law enforcement agencies report they have deployed, collectively, 1,564 fixed ALPRs. Flock is the biggest supplier in the state, providing about 40%. “I’m not saying that it’s not a choice,” Langley said. “I’m just saying that for me, the trade-off is I don’t know how many more 11-year-old girls need to be kidnapped, or human trafficking rings, or Silver Alerts, or Amber Alerts we have to go through before we say, ‘Enough is enough.’ Now, the beauty of America, though, is that every city, state, county gets to pick. It’s not my choice.” Grumbling over what is the right choice grew louder as the summer progressed, prompting Gov. Ned Lamont on August 7 to urge a moratorium by municipalities on new Flock installations and to request the Police Officers Standards and Training Council recommend standards for their deployment and use. Bipartisan concern In South Windsor, it was the choice of a town council that Democrats flipped last year, winning a 6-3 majority. The vote to turn off Flock’s cameras was partisan, with every Democrat in favor and every Republican opposed. But the issue blurs party lines in ways unlike most issues.  In Milford, a Republican alderman pushed a permanent ban, backed by a DeFlock Milford movement organized by a Democratic activist. Instead, after a number of raucous hearings and meetings, the Board of Aldermen voted Monday to pause their use, pending further study by a technology committee. The Republican governors of Texas and Florida have moved against ALPRs, with Florida banning them from state highways and Texas pausing state spending on them. Last month, at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing titled, “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network,” observers were treated to the rare sight of the conservative Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and liberal Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on the same side of an issue. Both expressed alarm at how quickly a private company had managed to construct a network that records 20 billion images each month with little regulatory oversight as to their storage or use. “It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country before,” Hawley said. Blumenthal told the committee the issue is a source of near-daily headlines in Connecticut. In an interview this week, he said Flock has become a catalyst for larger concerns over big tech in general and AI and more specifically. “The controversy about the Flock cameras has struck a nerve. It’s like an existential dread of loss of privacy, abuse of systems to surveil, and big government, big corporations somehow tracking people,” Blumenthal said. “If the controversy with  these cameras had occurred five years ago, it would not have inflamed the kind of emotions that it has.” Flock declined to send a representative to the hearing, and the company declined comment for this story. Artificial intelligence technology The debate over license plate readers often is conflated with concerns over cameras used to ticket motorists for speeding or running red lights. The systems are separate, and civil libertarians see a significant difference between an image triggered by a specific act versus images recorded over every passing vehicle. ALPRs are old technology. What’s new is the AI that allows Flock to rapidly sort and catalog billions images of license plates, make and model of cars, roof racks, bumper stickers and other identifiers.  “This is all supercharged by AI,” said Alasdair Whitney, a legislative counsel for the Institute for Justice, which has proposed federal standards for their use. “A couple of years ago, you couldn’t possibly sift through 20 billion images with just a few officers, or even a hundred or a thousand officers.” Subscribers essentially can go back in time, tracking a vehicle’s movements by ALPRs over previous hours, days or weeks. The technology was used last week to track a murder suspect from Middletown to West Hartford within hours of the crime. He was arrested after a chase and exchange of gunfire. Eric J. Weiner, who sparked an examination of Flock in Windsor, addressed the South Windsor council before its vote on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026. Credit: Mark Pazniokas / CT Mirror It also allowed a sheriff’s deputy in Johnson County, Texas, to search last year in Connecticut for a car belonging to a woman who had an abortion, a discovery by a retired tech executive, Eric J. Weiner of Windsor, through a Freedom of Information Act request to his local police department. Weiner’s FOI request was a match that lit a fire over Flock in Connecticut. The inspiration for Weiner’s request was a story posted May 29, 2025 by 404 Media, a news site that focuses on technology and its impact on society. The headline: “A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion.” Weiner was curious if images from Windsor were part of the search. Windsor responded to his FOI request within 48 hours, producing a log of Flock searches for about two months, from April 1, 2025 through June 9,  2025, when he filed his request. “And surprise, surprise: There were 590,900 records in that data dump, illustrating that across the country, Windsor’s data had been searched that number of times,” Weiner said. “And 150,000 of those searches were just from Texas, and of those, about 100,000 were from Houston, and that was just bizarre.” One drew his eye. Under reason for search, it stated: “had an abortion, search for female.” Weiner took his finding to the Windsor police chief, Donald Melanson. They had spoken in the past about ALPRs, and Weiner found him responsive. Melanson discovered his cameras unknowingly had been configured to be accessible nationally, Weiner said. Melanson, who did not respond to a request for an interview, began tightening the parameters on who could see data derived from images in Windsor, Weiner said. Houston? Off limits. Eventually, only police agencies in Connecticut had access. “And this was all self-driven by him,” Weiner said. “He wasn’t getting outside pressure at this point, but this did catch the attention of our town council and many members of the public. It got kicked over to the town council, which has a health and safety committee made up of three town councilors.” What followed in Windsor was something missing when Flock arrived there and across the Connecticut River in South Windsor: A long and belated public discussion about the pros and cons of automated license plate readers. Don Bell, a senior policy counsel to the Project on Government Oversight who watched the unfolding drama as vice chair of the town council in neighboring East Hartford, said the introduction of ALPRs without notice was the industry’s “original sin.” “I think most Americans have an expectation that if a technology as powerful as an automated license plate reader is going to be deployed in their community, that they’re at least going to get some heads up about it,” Bell said. “And in many instances, not only was there no heads up, there was no public process, there was no vote, there was no discussion on any of the issues that a community would want to think about with using these kinds of technologies.” South Windsor In South Windsor, according to documents the town provided to The Connecticut Mirror, the police chief signed a memorandum of understanding with Flock on March 30, 2023. Lindstrom said it was a preliminary step that gave his department access to Flock data from neighboring Manchester. After a review and recommendation from the sergeant in charge of his investigative unit, Lindstrom took the next step in November, briefing the council in executive session of his plans to use money from a grant to contract with Flock. No public vote was needed or sought. “I went to them, really not looking for permission, but rather seeking endorsement, because I knew or felt that it could drift towards some type of a political hot potato, right?” Lindstrom said. “So I wanted their endorsement. I wanted them to know what we were doing, and again, I tried to walk the line between permission versus endorsement.” On Nov. 28, 2023, the sergeant overseeing the investigations unit signed a one-year lease for Flock to install and operate six “Flock Safety Falcon” cameras with “Vehicle Fingerprint technology to capture vehicular attributes” at a cost of $19,400.  They later added two cameras. The eight provided bidirectional coverage at four locations. In a town where the starting pay for a police officer is $87,000, Lindstrom would call them a cost-effective “force multiplier.” The cameras did not become operational until April 2025, a delay Lindstrom attributed to getting the state Department of Transportation to sign off on installing the devices on Route 5, a state right of way.  Two months later, Weiner would get his FOI data and begin a yearlong public debate in Windsor that eventually would spill across the river. Windsor moved deliberately, listening to residents. On Jan. 5, 2026, the council adopted a policy for ALPR data use and security — and quickly discovered that its contract with Flock did not comport with the new policy. The next month, the council voted 8-1 to turn off the cameras and renegotiate with Flock. In June, the council’s health and safety committee sent a motion to the full council to turn the cameras back on under new rules. It was rejected on a 5-4 vote, ending Windsor’s relationship with Flock. The cameras began coming down in September, as South Windsor held its first hearing. None of this occurred in a vacuum. On August 19, the Washington Post published a story detailing how police officers used the Flock data base to track wives and former romantic partners, exposing a glaring weakness: In some departments there were no regular audits on usage. Secure Justice, a nonprofit tracking surveillance, reported that Flock lost more than 100 contracts, mainly for its ALPRs, in August and a similar number again in September. More regulation Responding to Lamont’s request in August, the Police Officers Standards and Training council, POST, issued a 59-page report last month recommending stringent standards for Connecticut beyond a limited law that took effect Oct. 1. It is likely to be the basis of legislation drafted after the General Assembly returns in January.  Recommendations included limiting retention of data collected by license plate readers and other sources to seven days, further tightening the 21-day limit set in the new law. They also called for greater oversight on access to the data, including two-step logins, tracking of usage by case numbers and monthly audits, as well as standards for how many cameras are deployed and the rationales for their locations. The conservative Manhattan Institute made similar suggestions, saying the technology is worth saving the backlash was “overhyped.” Flock itself already was installing similar safeguards on its system. But the momentum was against them, and their crisis communication strategy seemed geared too heavily at legislative bodies, not a broader public that polling found to have turned against the company over the summer. “What they’ve done is actually some good things, but their narrative hasn’t changed,” said Doug Johnson, a crisis communication consultant who has written about the controversy. “You know, it’s the trial by media that’s killing them right now.” On Oct. 2, an Oklahoma federal judge generated a fresh round of damaging headlines, ruling that a Tulsa County deputy’s warrantless, monthlong search of a driver’s travel history through Flock’s data base violated the Fourth Amendment. “No doubt, ALPR technology comes with remarkable benefits that the court cannot ignore. But the Fourth Amendment requires courts to draw a line when the cost is too great,” wrote U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill. She called the tracking “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance.” Elected officials at various levels of government, from the town council in South Windsor to the U.S. Senate, said the company has a crisis of credibility, not technology. Weiner told the POST council he admired the thoughtfulness behind the recommended safeguards, but he had chilled to the idea of effective regulation. “I came into this with a very strong belief in regulation and that we can find a path through to address the civil liberties concerns and, at the same time, allow the good technology to move forward,” he said. “My view is completely changed in the last six months.” The audience at public hearing in South Windsor on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026, was asked to indicated if they supported turning off Flock’s cameras. Credit: mark pazniokas / CT Mirror South Windsor Mayor Craig Zimmerman, a voting member of the town council, said he had come to the same conclusion, abandoning his initial belief the cameras could be kept and used under stricter rules. Michael Ouellette, a Republican councilor, asked for more time to assess Flock’s impact in town. “I haven’t heard anything about the use of Flock in South Windsor, Ouellette said. As for the problems, he said, “It’s everywhere else.” Lindstrom, the police chief, made one last effort to turn sentiment around.  On Oct. 2, Lindstrom had activated Flock’s transparency portal, an optional online tool that had gone unused in South Windsor. It provides data on usage — and who has access to its images. In some communities, the portal allows the public to examine a monthly log of searches and the reason for the inquiries. Lindstrom gave the council a memo stating, as of Oct. 1, that South Windsor only shared its Flock data with law enforcement in 53 communities, all in Connecticut, and there were only 77 searches of the data in the previous 30 days. “Seventy-seven known searches,” Zimmerman said. He clearly did not trust Flock, a problem that could not be reconciled in South Windsor. Lindstrom’s prior effort before the council in September had not gone well. Lindstrom said there was no expectation of privacy on a public road, and the Flock system was a useful tool that could be safely used by his officers. Deputy Mayor Andrew Paterna told Lindstrom he respected and trusted the police department, but not Flock.  “I’m not going to argue,” Lindstrom said sharply. “You guys want to shut it off, that’s on you. But when your wife goes missing, or something happens —”  Lindstrom did not finish the sentence. Instead, he asked, “What’s the value of my mother when she goes missing?” He did not speak at the most recent hearing, which was held on Oct. 5, the same night the council voted. All 10 people who spoke urged the council to turn off the cameras. Zimmerman called for a straw vote, asking those in the audience their preference, regardless of whether they had testified. Opposed to Flock? Eighteen raised their hands. In favor of Flock? One woman in the last row raised her hand. Zimmerman scanned the room, seeing if there was anyone else in favor.  From a seat in the front row, the chief of police raised his hand. Police Chief Kristian Lindstrom signifying his support for Flock cameras at a meeting on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026. Credit: mark pazniokas / CT Mirror ...read more read less