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Crime, Law and Justice
Cait Kelley

Plymouth is latest Minnesota city to ditch Flock cameras

A Flock camera and license plate reader is seen against a tree.
A Flock camera monitors traffic along a street in South St. Paul earlier this year. Elsewhere in the Twin Cities metro, the Plymouth City Council has voted to end the city's contract with Flock Safety.
Andrew Krueger | MPR News file

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The Plymouth City Council voted Tuesday evening to stop using all of the city’s Flock Safety cameras, citing data privacy concerns and plummeting public trust in the company.

Flock cameras have been at the center of a swirling national debate about whether artificial intelligence and surveillance technology are more helpful or harmful to public safety.

The cameras are a type of automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, that automatically capture, analyze and store license plate information. Flock cameras use artificial intelligence to identify license plate numbers, make and model of vehicles, and other visible details of vehicles like bike racks.

The Plymouth City Council first approved use of automated license plate readers in 2023, and the Twin Cities suburb currently has 16 permanent Flock cameras. According to a Plymouth Police Department presentation, the cameras have helped during multiple criminal investigations, including detaining suspects after a drive-by shooting and locating a domestic assault suspect.

However, a wave of national public backlash has been building against automated license plate readers and Flock specifically — Flock is one of the largest ALPR vendors — over concerns about who can access the camera data and how the data is used. Vigilantes across the state and the country have gone as far as to disable or cut down the cameras.

A Minnesota Star Tribune investigation found that through partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, federal agencies were able to access Flock camera data in Minnesota for civil immigration enforcement — despite Minnesota law limiting the data’s use to criminal investigations.

A Washington Post investigation found authorities have accused at least 50 law enforcement officers of misusing Flock camera data, including to stalk women.

Plymouth police said they have never shared their camera data with federal agencies, and they recently expanded that to all police agencies.

At Tuesday’s meeting, council member Joel Spoonheim said Plymouth knows all too well how vulnerable city data systems can be. Plymouth was among the several dozen Minnesota cities whose water systems were targeted in a July cyberattack that disrupted water utilities.

Echoing other council members, Spoonheim said it was clear to him that the cameras can be life-saving technology in the hands of Plymouth police.

“But I echo the concerns that my colleagues have raised about people outside of Plymouth being able to access this data and not follow the ethics that we see so rigorously upheld within our department,” Spoonheim said.

The only dissenting vote was cast by Mayor Jeffry Wosje.

“I know people have concern, but I’m weighing this against what we all talked about — the ability to keep our residents safe and catch the bad guys — versus basically the bad PR that Flock has,” Wosje said.

“And I’m going to come down and on the side of our public safety, our police department, to say if they need a tool in their toolbox. I’m going to be OK if there’s a little heat to take for that,” Wosje added.

Plymouth joins a growing list of more than a dozen jurisdictions in Minnesota that have paused or ended use of Flock cameras, including St. Paul, Duluth and Sherburne County.