Eudora Police Chief Wes Lovett wants an automated license plate reader posted at the city’s only stoplight, but he has already crossed one major vendor off the list entirely: Flock Safety. The roughly $18,000 request is working its way through city hall discussions as officials also ask voters to approve a new public safety sales tax on the November ballot.
Lovett told KSHB 41 Kansas City that the department is researching an ALPR system with short-term data storage and limited data access, and that Flock-branded cameras have been eliminated from consideration. He said Eudora can learn from the mistakes other departments have made with license plate readers, framing the search as a deliberate attempt to avoid the backlash that has hit nearby communities.
That backlash has been hard to miss in eastern Kansas. In August, the neighboring cities of Gardner and Wellsville both terminated their Flock Safety contracts after residents pushed back over mass surveillance concerns and third-party vendor access to camera data, according to the Johnson County Post. Gardner had reportedly spent $33,000 on setup and $13,000 annually before pulling the plug, a detail Hoodline also reported in its own coverage of Gardner’s Flock cancellation.
A Statewide Legal Fight Over Flock
The scrutiny extends beyond small towns. In July, the Kansas Justice Institute filed suit in Sedgwick County District Court challenging Wichita’s network of roughly 200 Flock cameras, arguing in the case Grimmett v. City of Wichita that warrantless automated vehicle fingerprinting functions as a de facto GPS tracker, as reported by Reason Magazine. Civil liberties advocates have also pointed to a February case the ACLU documented in Lenexa, Kansas, where police reportedly used license plate readers to monitor a resident’s vehicle movements and issue a be-on-the-lookout alert after he published a newspaper op-ed critical of local police…