Former Pawtucket officer continues sharing concerns with Flock Safety cameras

Our Take

When a police officer is willing to put his own career on the line to warn the public about a surveillance system, that's not a story to skim past. Noel Pichardo didn't just quietly grumble about Flock Safety cameras in Pawtucket — he went public in 2023 and, according to WPRI's follow-up, he's still at it. That kind of persistence from someone who worked inside the system carries a different weight than the usual privacy advocate op-ed. It's a signal that the unease about these networks isn't limited to civil liberties groups; it's showing up among the people who were supposed to operate them.

What makes officer whistleblowers like Pichardo valuable is that they've seen the machinery up close: how the data gets pulled, who can query it, how loosely "public safety justification" gets interpreted once a department has a searchable log of everyone's movements. Departments and Flock love to frame these systems as narrow tools for finding stolen cars or Amber Alerts, but the people running the cameras day-to-day are often the first to notice mission creep — and the first to pay a professional price for saying so out loud.

Credit to WPRI for continuing to give this story oxygen instead of letting it fade after the initial headline. Stories like this are exactly why we keep pushing people to check our camera map to see what's already watching their own streets, and to use our take-action tools if they want their city council to actually answer for it.