“Every industry in the country upgrades their technology,” Police Chief John Quaka told American Family Radio. “But, for some reason, people in America don't want the police to use the technology,”
Quaka, who is police chief for Tupelo, Miss., was invited on “The Core” program to discuss the Flock Safety company and its controversial surveillance cameras.
Even though license plate readers are not brand new technology, Flock itself has been generating controversy. The high-tech company, now worth $8 billion, has been compared to George Orwell’s “Big Brother” and to China’s emergence as a paranoid-driven surveillance state.
Tupelo, a small city of 38,000 in North Mississippi, is most famous as the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
The city government also has a contract with Flock Safety, and other vendors, for the 33 license plate readers, or LPRs, that watch the city’s public streets.
Quaka told show host Walker Wildmon that Tupelo police have used LPRs to end a kidnapping, when the kidnapper’s license plate was picked up by a Tupelo camera. The same technology was also used to locate a dementia patient who had gone missing.
Citing a more “proactive” example, the police chief described a string of West Tupelo car burglaries that were happening around dawn. Because of that unusual time frame, the LPRs were reviewed for traffic in the area. The early-morning traffic was narrowed to a list of 10 automobiles that helped catch the thief.
“We actually got a picture from a Ring camera of the car that was committing the burglaries,” Quaka recalled. “And it matched one of the cars that was hitting our LPRs.”
Despite those examples of Flock technology catching criminals, Wildmon pointed out there are also examples of controversy. One recent example, he said, was in a suburb of Austin, Texas, where the City of Pflugerville contracted with Flock Safety.
According to a related Houston Chronicle story, the City of Pflugerville cancelled its Flock contract after learning Flock allowed numerous outside law enforcement agencies to access the city’s 28 cameras without the city's knowledge.
The Flock Safety-Pflugerville partnership dated back to 2020, the story said.
Elsewhere in Texas, where approximately 13,000 Flock cameras are reportedly on the streets, a Katy police officer is accused of using LPR technology to stalk his ex-wife.
A police officer in Lufkin was charged with misuse of official information, a felony, after allegedly using Flock’s data to conduct thousands of searches and logged each one as “investigation.”
After that controversy, the City of Lufkin shut off its Flock cameras.
According to Chief Quaka, only designated TPD officers have access to the Flock license plate data. Those officers must log into the system, and state a reason for the search, and their access is monitored.
“We created a position within our police department just to manage this and our real-time command center,” Quaka advised. “We created a position known as captain of technology, and that's what he does. That's his only job.”
