Critics of the surveillance state are worried that local governments that are cancelling their contracts with Flock Safety will replace them with different brands that do the same thing.
Like officials in many other jurisdictions across Virginia, leaders in James City County cancelled their contract with Flock Safety, the most well-known company that offers license plate readers. But unlike officials in other locations, they’re replacing them with a different brand, Axon.
Shawn Weneta at Cavalier Consulting is a criminal justice advocate and critic of how this data is protected.
"What we're not hearing when we hear these localities and these different police chiefs say that they're terminating their Flock contract — what they're not saying is, 'Hey, we're not going to sign up for license plate reader technology with another vendor, like Axon or Motorola.' Flock has just sort of become the villain in this story," Weneta says.
Chris Kaiser at the ACLU says switching brands is not going to address the backlash.
"What people don't want is for the government or some tech company to have a continuously searchable database of where every single person is going, when they're going and who they're with. And that's what all of these companies do. That’s the whole model of automatic license plate readers," Kaiser says. "So, if officials think that they're going to assuage concerns from the public by switching to another vendor, they're going to find out that they're wrong."
He says the General Assembly should ban this technology when they gavel into session in January, although Governor Abigail Spanberger is on the record saying the technology is a vital tool for solving crimes.
