Every Rhode Island driver’s movements are being logged by a statewide camera network that no state statute governs — no rules on retention, access, or sharing — and the decisions to host the cameras are being made town by town, often without a public hearing.
Rhode Island State Police are putting 39 automatic license plate readers on roads across the state under a three-year, $597,000 contract with Flock Safety, the Atlanta company whose cameras photograph every passing plate — along with the time, the location, the vehicle’s color and body type — and dump the result into a searchable database that police can query by plate number or by description. The money comes from a federal COPS grant, the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services program, which set aside $579,000 for the 39 units. The contract term begins once all of them are in the ground.
They will be joining a network that is already large. The ACLU of Rhode Island counts more than 290 Flock cameras statewide, municipal and state police combined — a system that started modestly in 2021 in Woonsocket, Cranston and Pawtucket, expanded to Providence on a free one-year trial in 2022, and has grown, town by town and council vote by council vote, into one of the densest plate-reader grids in New England. Cranston alone has 29 active cameras…