Flock Safety appears to be getting careless

 Last year the Los Altos City Council approved the installation of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from a company called Flock Safety. While the efficacy of ALPRs as a crime-fighting tool has proven very difficult to see (for example, this and this show little statistical evidence for improvement), a new problem has come to light:

It seems that Flock tends to be pretty casual about the rules.

Two articles came out recently that call Flock's carefulness into question. 

First, a Forbes article (more reporting here) found that Flock frequently put up cameras without regard to permitting or traffic safety considerations. "[I]n its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states. In two, state agencies have banned Flock staff from installing new cameras," Forbes correspondents Thomas Brewster and Cyrus Farivar report.

Apparently, in the Silicon Valley tradition of moving fast and breaking stuff, Flock often didn't wait to understand the full permitting process, and set up hundreds of cameras without permission. This may be carelessness or recklessness rather than intentional malevolence towards the law, but either way, it's pretty concerning.

Second, Jason Koebler at 404 Media dug into some splashy headlines that Flock has been touting. Apparently, the white paper that Flock released touting their being "instrumental in solving 10% of freported crime in the US" was statistically bogus. Two academics involved in the study are now backing away, when the details of the methodology came to light.

The paper was not peer reviewed, and it wasn't published in an academic journal, but Flock is still using this marketing piece as alleged evidence that ALPRs work.

In fact, it turns out that this isn't the first time: the example of the San Marino police department "success" in reducing crime by 70% -- an example touted by Flock in front of our own City Council -- wasn't true. Even the San Marino police chief says it's wrong.

All this means that when we review the results of our one-year Flock trial period this summer, we need to squint extra hard at claims made by Flock. We should be asking questions like:

• Are those results peer-reviewed?
• Have important metrics of Los Altos crime, like Clearance Rate, improved during the period of use?
• For examples of success, are these crimes that the LAPD would not have solved previously?

We can't trust Flock at their word, because they have shown themselves to be willing to go well beyond the truth. We have to ask the hard questions to make sure we're not getting sold a bill of goods.