Currently, in the city of Durango, there are 21 Flock Safety Cameras installed on top of traffic lights across the city limits and three at entrances to the Fort Lewis College campus. There is also one mobile trailer. Police Chief Brice Current says Flock is a tool local law enforcement uses. “We want to utilize any technology, and Flock Safety is a technology, one of the many technologies we use to create a safer environment in our city, he said.”
Flock Safety is a privately owned venture-backed startup worth $7.8 billion, and the technology is used in 5,000 communities across the country, including several in Colorado.
Flock has been in use in Durango since 2023. These cameras capture images of each passing car: its licence plate number, make, model, color, and even bumper stickers and dents. AI then catalogs all this information, and it becomes a searchable database for officers. Current says this allows officers to pinpoint vehicles under investigation.
“We look at the needle, not the haystack. The haystack is never looked at. Unless I had twenty people in a room watching video all the time, and we don’t.” Every time a car passes in front of a camera, its plate gets cross-checked with the Colorado Crime Information Center. If the vehicle is associated with a warrant, officers get real-time alerts of its whereabouts. Officers can use it to retrieve the location history of vehicles. They can also create customized alerts for people under suspicion.
“The alerts that come through, whether it’s a stolen car, a stolen license plate, or the person coming in has a warrant for arrest,” Deputy Chief Chris Gonzales said. “Other than that, if it's not flagged, then there has to be a very specific search for them to go in and find that information.”
Officers can receive real-time notifications of vehicles' whereabouts that are associated with a warrant. And it’s not just Durango’s data they can search; it also includes nationwide locations. As of now, 600 other departments have access to Durango’s data.
“If you drive a personal vehicle in Durango, your movements are being logged by this system. There isn’t really any way around that,” said Ben Peters, who is a resident of Durango.
Peters says Flock’s sharing capability leaves potential loopholes when it comes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I found that there were 60 agencies that Durango had shared access to its camera network with that have an active 287(g) agreement with ICE.”
These are agreements between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities. There are none of these in Colorado. However, Peters submitted a request to see who the Durango Police Department is sharing their data with across the country. He cross-referenced that list with the Department of Homeland Security.
“So what this means is, 60 agencies that can perform work on behalf of ICE and ICE functions have access to Durango’s camera network.”
SB-25-276, passed by Colorado lawmakers this year, prohibits state departments from sharing identifiable information with other agencies for immigration purposes. So while the Durango Police Department has said they’ve denied Homeland Security access to their Flock data, Peters says they left a backdoor open.
“I do believe the department has violated the Colorado law because the information that is collected by Flock is personally identifiable,” Peters said. “It’s license plate information, which is tied to vehicle registration, which is tied to a person’s name and address; it’s a search database of location histories. And it was made available to ICE through an intermediary.”
When Peters brought this to the DPD’s attention, they were unaware that departments that had these agreements had access to their system.
“They heavily redacted most of the information contained in the logs,” Peters said. So I don’t know how many of these searches are associated with a case number.
Peter’s request also revealed it’s unclear how the DPD is conducting searches.
“We don’t know what the search terms used were: if they were searching names, or just license plate numbers, vehicle descriptions, we don’t know any of that. We don’t know the justifications for the searches.”
Last summer, the DPD also bought a mobile trailer with a Flock camera. It’s currently at Schneider Park along the river trail, near a highway intersection. The mobile trailer was also present during the No Kings Protest in October. Peters says this is concerning.
“Well, this obviously does more than read license plates. It was in a place that doesn't have vehicle traffic. It was in a crowd of people. And so if it is just a license plate reader, a system like that wouldn't have much function there.”
The DPD says that the trailer takes retroactive video that is used to monitor crime. They say they own that data and delete it after 30 days. But Anaya Robinson, the Public Policy Director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, says that’s not totally true. Flock’s contracts with municipalities contain an additional provision.
“Once the data is anonymized, Flock does have ownership of that data in perpetuity, forever, worldwide,” said Robinson.
Robinson notes that at that point, Flock can do whatever it wants with the data collected by the DPD, including selling it to other companies, or it can be used to train AI.
“It feels so sinister, and simultaneously so impressive that Flock has built a national network of surveillance effectively without virtually anyone knowing,” said Robinson.
Robinson says the ACLU doesn’t necessarily have a problem with automatic license plate readers, but when law enforcement has access to a searchable location history, it’s a threat to civil liberties.
“When we talk about any type of surveillance technology, we would like to see it applied and utilized in a way that doesn't disrupt the protections that we all get to have access to under the Fourth Amendment,” said Robinson.
He also says it’s important that community members and local governments have a say in whether or not a contract moves forward.
“It creates a checks and balances system. So that a division or a department, a government entity, isn't making unilateral decisions about whether they get to surveil the community. We are removing that from the people who are using that tool and giving it to the folks who are elected by the people to make those decisions,” said Robinson.
And, he says, most importantly, it brings the public into the conversation.
“It creates the requirement of a public process to discuss whether or not the community is willing to give those civil rights and civil liberties for the use of this surveillance technology, and weighing whether that technology is going to do enough to support public safety to make sense for the erosion of those civil liberties,” said Robinson.
The Durango Police Department’s contract with the license plate readers goes until September 2027.
