Flock Safety license-plate reader technology credited for tracking Brown, MIT shooter's movements

Our Take

Every time a manhunt ends with an arrest, Flock Safety gets a press-friendly anecdote it can hand to city councils for the next decade. Boston 25 News reports that plate-reader data reportedly helped investigators track the fugitive tied to the Brown University shooting and the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. A violent case like this is exactly the kind of story that gets rolled out whenever a town debates whether to install more cameras — and it works, because nobody wants to be the council member who voted against catching a killer.

What doesn't get mentioned in these segments is that the same network that logged this one suspect's plate also logged the plate of every other driver who passed those cameras that day — commuters, delivery drivers, people going to therapy appointments or protests, none of them suspected of anything. Flock's pitch has always been built on the rare, dramatic success story, not on the routine, invisible dragnet that makes it possible. One case solved doesn't erase millions of scans of innocent people that get stored, shared, and sometimes queried for reasons that have nothing to do with violent crime.

We're not going to pretend the technology can't ever help find a genuinely dangerous suspect — it can, and this case is a real example. But the tradeoff is a nationwide surveillance grid with almost no public oversight, retention limits, or accountability for misuse. Check our camera map to see how much of that grid is already sitting in your own neighborhood, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back on how it's used.