Protesters rally against Waltham’s use of license plate reader cameras
Residents gathered Sunday near Main and Prospect streets to protest the city’s use of Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras and to raise concerns about privacy, transparency and public oversight.
A speaker who identified himself only as Orion said the cameras photograph vehicles and record license plate information throughout the city.
“They are taking photos of all of the cars that are coming through this intersection and a bunch of the other intersections around Waltham,” he said. “They are recording license plate numbers.
“We care very much about the privacy of everybody that is going through the area,” Orion said. “We also want to make sure that any kind of procurement process for cameras, like the Flock automatic license plate readers that are installed here, goes through channels where there is public discussion and the chance for folks like us to be able to have our say and be heard.”
‘The right way to do things’
The Waltham Police Department in June 2025 signed a two-year, $96,000 agreement with Flock Safety for 16 cameras. The department paid with money seized through court proceedings, which did not require City Council approval. The purchase was not announced publicly before the cameras were installed, and city officials later said the Law Department had not reviewed the contract before it was signed. Public meetings and City Council discussions took place after residents raised concerns.
Police have said the cameras are used for criminal investigations and to locate missing or endangered people. Under department policy, searches of data captured by the cameras require an incident number and a stated reason. Department policy also stipulates that system use is audited and collected information is normally deleted after 30 days. The policy prohibits using the system for immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or personal purposes. The department has also said it does not share the information with federal agencies and limits network sharing to approved Massachusetts law enforcement agencies.
Orion criticized the process through which the cameras were acquired.
“Unfortunately, the way that the license plate readers were installed was done without any public comment or discussion period, and that is not the right way to do things,” he said.
How the cameras work
According to Flock Safety, the cameras are motion activated and take still images — not video — of passing vehicles, capturing the license plate plus the make, model, color and details such as bumper stickers or damage, then storing each record in a searchable cloud database with the time and location. Plates are automatically checked against state and national crime databases, alerting officers to matches. The company says the cameras photograph vehicles, not people, and do not use facial recognition. Flock’s standard 30-day retention period matches Waltham’s policy, though the company announced Aug. 13 that it was cutting its recommended default to seven days after mounting criticism.
Critics say those limits fall short. Reporting by 404 Media and research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found thousands of searches of Flock data nationwide tied to immigration enforcement, often run by local officers for federal agencies. And an audit by an Illinois city found the company had given U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to that state’s data in violation of state law. Several cities have since canceled their contracts.
During Sunday’s protest in Waltham, participants noticed that wires connected to the Flock camera at Main and Prospect streets appeared to have been cut and that the device appeared inactive. However, no official information was immediately available about whether and when the wires were actually cut or whether the device was operational.
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It’s not good enough to trust Waltham PD.
Officers in both Stow and New Bedford have already been caught abusing the Flock system. Waltham PD was sharing their Flock data with both departments at the time of the abuses. Waltham PD’s audits didn’t catch that.
They actually don’t even check for it. According to their own statements to the city council they only audit, on average, about one random local Flock search per day, and they do not make the results public. So you don’t just have to trust them. You have to trust them implicitly.
Worse, they don’t audit searches by the agencies they share with at all. Even if they wanted to, Flock has taken intentional steps to make that very difficult.
So you have to also implicitly trust every department Waltham PD is sharing with. That includes the Department of Corrections, which has a 287(g) agreement to share data with the federal government. And it includes the State Police, with their checkered history of scandals and controversy.
And you have to implicitly trust the Flock system. A California city recently checked and found that more than 7 out of 10 alerts they got from the Flock system were errors.
And you have to implicitly trust Flock, a for-profit company that has taken enough investor money to reach a multi-billion dollar valuation. That includes money from Peter Thiel, the guy who, when asked if humanity deserved to survive, famously had to think it over for a disturbingly long time. And Andreessen Horowitz, run by a guy who rather famously claims never to engage in self-reflection. They didn’t invest that much money to protect us. They invested it with the expectation of massive profits at public expense.
Flock is a company that has proven time and time again that it does not deserve that trust.
A company that lied to its own customers about relationships with the Federal government.
A company who sends reps to stand in front of city councils and say “Our products don’t track people” and then sends promotional videos to police agencies full of glowing claims from their peers about how easy it makes it to track people. A fact that hits a lot different when you find out how often the people being easily tracked are officers’ ex-girlfriends.
A company that tells departments not to worry about enabling their “transparency portals” because they are designed so that, and I quote, “There is nothing the public can gain from this report.”
A company that has set up accounts in cooperating departments’ systems to let Flock employees run searches that other agencies, like Waltham PD, can’t tell aren’t from sworn police officers in that department.
Flock’s CEO said in a Bloomberg interview last week that “We don’t add new cities very often.” And hundreds of cities have dropped, blocked, or suspended Flock, including a bunch here in Massachusetts. Every time they do, Flock’s shared network gets weaker. That shared network is what they use to justify charging us $3,000/year for what’s basically a small camera, a cheap cell phone, and an ugly solar panel. It was a bad deal to start with and, to quote Lando Calrissian, “This deal is getting worse all the time.”
In that same interview, their CEO said that’s why they’re looking to increase their profits with new products. They have to. If they don’t make the maximum profit, their investors will sue them.
No matter where your red line is, if Flock hasn’t already crossed it, they will eventually. Just give them some more time. Or, better yet, don’t.
Everything about the Flock contract is troubling, how it was approved, installed and paid for. Not to mention Flock itself has some very serious safety concerns. The data collected is more than license plates, its car size/type, damage, stickers, gender of the driver, etc. Theres even reports that it collects pedestrian data. All this data is analyzed by AI, and stored in data centers in California and other places around the world. Its shared with ICE and other law enforcement and all without warrants, approval from the Waltham PD, etc. Flock will tell you a different story about the data and how its stored and shared, but they’ve been hacked more times than I can count and its showed a very different picture than thier PR machine will let on. Waltham needs to remove flock and other similar technologies NOW.
I fully support our local police department and appreciate the important public safety work they do every day. This article, along with the many previous articles on this issue, highlights an opportunity for community engagement. While some residents believe there is a lack of transparency, I think the Police Department deserves credit for already operating under a strict internal policy as pointed out in the article. To get community buy-in, our city leaders should formalize these existing protections into a policy based on the department’s internal guidelines. There could be community hearings to collaboratively determine what if any further safeguards may be appropriate.