Houston police are the number one searchers of a Flock camera network more than a thousand miles away, according to new data obtained by KPRC 2 News from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The automated license plate readers have gained a lot of attention in recent months over questions and concerns about privacy.
The data from March through May of this year shows the Houston Police Department ran 183,252 searches of the UNC Charlotte Flock network, which consists of 17 cameras.
“UNC Charlotte participates in Flock’s law enforcement network and shares limited search capability with participating law enforcement agencies that also share information with UNC Charlotte. For those agencies, a search can indicate whether a particular license plate was detected by a UNC Charlotte camera. The result provides the camera location, date and time. It does not provide the name of the person associated with the vehicle or its registration,” according to UNC’s website.
For context, the data shows HPD is the law enforcement agency with the highest amount of searches of UNC’s network, and it’s about five times more than searches conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“When an officer runs a license plate in Flock, the system searches a database of images that includes images from any camera shared with our department to identify a potential match,” the Houston Police Department told KPRC 2 News in a statement.
It’s part of a nationwide search feature offered by Flock, which the Pearland Police Department disabled last month.
According to a new report expected to be presented to the Pearland City Council next week, Pearland’s Flock network was searched 903,413 times by outside agencies from Aug. 10 through Sept. 9 this year, accounting for approximately 61 percent of the searches of Pearland’s network.
The nationwide search feature is reciprocal, meaning only agencies that participate are able to conduct a nationwide search.
With Pearland PD’s nationwide search feature turned off, Pearland officers are no longer able to conduct a nationwide search, but according to the city council report, PPD shares with 538 law enforcement agencies in Texas as part of a statewide search feature.
HPD told KPRC 2 News the department regularly reviews and investigates Flock usage by officers.
