Rhode Island has at least 295 Flock cameras scanning 2.8 million vehicles a month with no state law governing them, meaning every driver’s movements are logged under policies each police department writes for itself.
Two years before a Rhode Island woman ever filed a federal complaint against the Town of Cumberland, a man from her own town stood up in front of the Town Council’s ordinance subcommittee and told the members, in careful and specific terms, exactly what could go wrong with the surveillance cameras they were preparing to buy — and the record of that August 21, 2024 meeting reads today less like public comment than like a warning label nobody bothered to peel off.
Craig Cerwonka, a board member of the ACLU of Rhode Island and a Cumberland resident, laid out four objections to the town’s proposed adoption of Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader system — ALPRs, cameras that photograph passing vehicles, read the plate, log the make, model, color, and distinguishing features, and deposit all of it in a searchable cloud database that police can query after the fact. He cited the abuses in Kansas, where a police chief in the town of Sedgwick used the system more than 200 times over four months to stalk his former partner and her new boyfriend, losing his law enforcement certification and drawing 18 months of probation. He questioned whether the ICE provision in the Cranston Police Department’s general order — the policy Chief Matthew Benson indicated Cumberland would model — actually closes the door on federal immigration requests. He objected to the provision restricting ordinary residents from obtaining data the cameras collected about their own vehicles. And he made the argument that has aged the most sharply of the four: that town taxpayers, as he put it, “would be funding a system which will only provide prosecutorial evidence against them and destroys any exculpatory evidence that could aid the defense in a judicial proceeding.”…