At 4:24 p.m. on March 10, Sanford police got a report of a stolen vehicle. At 7 p.m., they asked law enforcement in New Hampshire and Massachusetts to search using their arrays of roadside cameras. The car was found the next day and three people were arrested.
Stolen vehicle investigations generally take months, if they are solved at all, said Sanford police Maj. Mark Dyer. But within hours of the reported theft, officers were able to locate the car using automatic license plate readers that scan, log and track every vehicle that drives past them using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Imagine if every city, at their downtowns and major intersections, had a set of these cameras,” Dyer said. “A stolen vehicle wouldn’t get very far.”
Sanford Police soon contacted the Atlanta-based company Flock Safety about installing cameras of their own, Dyer said. Last week, the City Council gave the green light for six to be installed around town on a 60-day trial basis.
Sanford will become just the second Maine community to use the cameras, but there are more than 80,000 roadside Flock cameras nationwide, monitoring and logging tens of millions of cars a day using AI technology. And the company has said it’s meeting with police departments across Maine as it looks to expand its presence here.
The expansion of Flock’s cameras has spurred privacy concerns in Maine and around the country. The company has been scrutinized for the amount of data it collects on people, often unknowingly, and its willingness to share that data and camera footage with federal immigration and border authorities.
Michael Kebede, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, said the Flock cameras test Fourth Amendment protections against police searches without probable cause. The cameras create a searchable log of every vehicle that drives by, regardless of whether the drivers are suspected of criminal activity or not. One lawsuit already has been filed on behalf of residents in Norfolk, Virginia, which has employed the cameras.
“Flock is a private company, and the restrictions that the Constitution places on the government don’t apply to private companies. Flock can do a lot more tracking and searching on us than the government can,” Kebede said. “And if Flock’s data is made available to the government, which we know it is, then the government doesn’t have to seek warrants from a judge.”
The company’s cameras and AI technology also tiptoe around Maine law, which expressly prohibits police from using traffic cameras to enforce the law or employing facial recognition technology in any capacity.
Sanford police say the cameras will only be used to aid in investigations, not to initiate them. In a statement, company representatives said their cameras do not use facial recognition technology and said Flock “does not have any such technology in development.”
Though Flock’s website says its AI systems only recognize license plates, not faces, Dyer said Sanford’s cameras will have the ability to identify passersby based on their clothes and certain physical attributes.
“Like a vehicle, we can put in certain parameters: Shirts, pants, hats, those types of things,” he said.
HOW ACCURATE ARE THEY?
Footage from Flock cameras can be, and often is, shared across departments that have them. Sanford police say that allows agencies to solve crimes across jurisdictions, as it did with the vehicle theft in March.
Those footage-sharing features have become a key tool in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Flock cameras across the country have been accessed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, an investigation by technology-focused publication 404 Media found, sometimes without the knowledge of local police.
Flock also is building a surveillance tool that will use personal information from websites, data breaches and Flock’s stored camera footage to profile individuals and track their movement without a warrant or a court order.
Flock Public Relations Manager Paris Lewbel said in an emailed statement that law enforcement agencies, not the company, choose to share footage with federal authorities. Flock “does not have a contractual relationship with ICE or any Department of Homeland Security agency,” Lewbel wrote.
In dozens of cases across the country automated license plate readers have misread plates and incorrectly flagged drivers. In 2023, two New Mexico women were detained solely because a Flock camera misread a number in their license plate. A Colorado family was handcuffed at gunpoint in 2020 after a Flock camera misidentified their SUV as a motorcycle from a different state.
Lewbel said Flock “always recommends that best practice is for an officer to confirm the computer translation prior to taking any action.”
He also said the company’s cameras operate “at the highest levels of accuracy in the industry,” and continue to improve.
“Although infrequent, license plate translation may be incomplete or inaccurate. False positives are flagged to continuously improve the system,” he wrote in an email.
MORE COMMUNITIES CONSIDERING
Lewbel declined to share a list of which Maine municipalities have implemented Flock cameras or have met with the company about installing them. A company representative told the Sanford City Council that Flock was meeting with towns and police departments elsewhere in the state, namely Augusta and Waterville.
Augusta Deputy Chief Jesse Brann confirmed meeting with Flock but said “there are no plans on installing (their cameras).” Waterville Police did not respond to an emailed question about whether they had met with the company.
In June, Lewiston received a grant to install 14 automated surveillance cameras around the city. Lt. Derrick St. Laurent said the cameras have not yet been put up and declined to share what company will manufacture them.
York is the only Maine municipality with Flock cameras installed to date. There are two along the Maine Turnpike, and four at the intersection of Spur Road & U.S. Route 1 just off Interstate 95. York Police Chief Owen Davis did not respond to an interview request about the town’s cameras.
Sanford’s cameras will be installed in the coming weeks at two intersections downtown, the park across from city hall and the South Sanford roundabout, according to Dyer, the Sanford police major.
Houlton installed two dozen cameras made by a different company, Verkada, in March 2024 for use by the town’s police department. The Aroostook County town shut the camera system down in February this year over concerns about the camera’s facial recognition capabilities violating Maine law, but turned them back on in June.
In the year the cameras were in use before being briefly taken down, town employees from various departments had used the cameras to search for individuals’ personal information thousands of times, according to a Bangor Daily News report last month.
“Imagine if you had a police officer analyzing every single frame and writing down detailed information about you, and your car and your movements?” said Kebede, with the Maine ACLU. “That is not at all contemplated by the law. The law is not catching up.”
“Towns are just kind of rushing headlong into these dystopian contracts with tech companies at very, very grave risk to their residents and to people all around the country.”