Controversial Flock Cameras to be Removed from South Portland Amid Privacy Concerns and Republican Push to Ban Them Statewide

The South Portland City Council voted Thursday to immediately terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety, a controversial surveillance company best known for its AI-enabled Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras that collect and store information on passing vehicles.

[RELATED: Maine Gets Flocked With New Camera Rollout Despite No Citizen Input…]

“The problem is with Flock itself. Flock retains the data. It may anonymize it; however, it is for AI education, and it is also shared. It is a big debate at the federal level right now,” said Councilor Rachel Coleman.

“To me, it’s a matter of the ends do not justify the means. This is an excellent tool the way our police force is using it and it is, like, state of the art, however, they’re also collecting data that causes harm to everyone, to each one of us,” she added.

The council ultimately voted 4-2 to end the city’s contract with Flock. It has immediately ceased use of its existing cameras and has submitted a work order for their removal.

The city first approved the Flock contract last year using a federal Justice Assistance Grant (JAG). Though the AI-powered surveillance cameras are marketed as a tool for public safety, they have drawn nationwide privacy concerns about the possibility of unprecedented government or corporate knowledge of individual habits and whereabouts.

The South Portland Police Department has advocated for their continued use, and has been waging a social media campaign in their favor, by posting about how they have been used recently to apprehend criminals, and even to rescue an abducted 12-year-old girl.

Councilors expressed their trust for the police but maintained concerns over how the data is used by Flock itself or other parties with access to the data it gathers.

“We don’t have real control of this data, so we don’t know actually what is going to happen with it in the future. We’ve heard folks say that there’s a disregard of their civil liberties,” said Mayor Elyse Tipton.

This issue was controversial enough to warrant two workshops for citizens to raise their concerns about the cameras, the first on May 19. Following that first workshop, the South Portland Police announced that it would only share the data captured by its Flock cameras with other Maine law enforcement agencies, not with agencies nationwide as it had been previously.

The council made its decision to end use of Flock cameras at the second workshop on Thursday.

While many of the councilors approached the issue from a left-wing perspective, expressing concerns about how the data could be used to aid immigration enforcement, fears over Flock surveillance are bipartisan.

Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) has been an outspoken opponent of the surveillance cameras and has opposed their installation in Auburn without input from citizens.

“This is a process that is playing out across the state and across the country, to the detriment of citizens and their privacy. Just as in Auburn, cameras installed with funding from a grant, so they are installed WITHOUT any citizen oversight. We should always have a say, rather than a secretive process that skirts citizen approval,” she said in March.

Rep. Libby also expressed support for legislation proposed by Rep. David Boyer (R-Poland) to ban the use of Flock cameras and other automated plate readers across the state.

“I have submitted legislation to “De-Flock” Maine. This would prohibit the use of Automatic License Plate Readers in Maine except for the purposes of toll collection on the Turnpike. It is time to dismantle the surveillance state,” said Rep. Boyer on Facebook in May.

On election day, Boyer collected signatures for a local Auburn citizen’s initiative to ban the cameras in that city.

According to DontGetFlocked.com, a site that shows the location of the cameras to help people avoid them on their travels, Maine has 49 cameras, while the U.S. as a whole has 104,430.