A Flock Safety license plate reader, located on East Adams Street, is pictured here. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current

Syracuse lawmakers have proposed revoking Flock Safety’s right to put license plate readers near city streets. That would include revoking the right for Flock Safety, the city’s license plate reader provider, to put up two readers Syracuse University planned to install.

Councilors Jimmy Monto and Corey Williams sent a letter to Common Council Clerk Patricia McBride proposing the revocation. The action follows calls from civil rights advocacy groups to terminate the city’s contract with Flock. National news organizations and privacy advocacy organizations have discovered gaps in Flock’s data-sharing policies and practices.

“This revocation is necessary because it has been brought to the attention of this Common Council that Flock has been collecting personal data that possibly violates the privacy of members of the public,” Monto wrote in the letter. “It is also of concern to this Common Council that such data may be inappropriately shared.”

Central Current requested comment from a spokesperson for Flock Safety, but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.

“The Department will review the legislation and be prepared to share information and consult with members of the Council regarding the proposal,” Syracuse Police Chief Joseph Cecile said in a statement provided to Central Current.

Reporters have found federal immigration agents were able to access Flock’s national network of local databases — which amount to a trove of license plate and car movement data — through local police officers despite the company insisting that it did not contract with federal agencies. 

A number of reports have caused problems for Flock. In at least one case, Texas cops leveraged Flock’s network to target a woman seeking an abortion — and attempted to charge her with a crime. An Illinois officer shared his login credentials with federal immigration agents. Flock then granted Customs and Border Patrol agents an account in Flock’s network.  

Since 2024, Flock has provided the Syracuse Police Department with AI-powered license plate readers, which document the plate number and other details of every vehicle that passes through their ever-watching view.

The councilors pointed to other cities across at least 11 states that have terminated contracts with Flock, or are in the process of doing so.

Austin, Texas led the charge in June, when city councilors voted against renewing the city’s Flock contract. One councilor stated after the vote that he believed “the technology was ahead of the policymakers.” 

Other jurisdictions have followed suit: Oak Park, Illinois, Hillsborough, North Carolina, and Eugene, Oregon and more municipalities have cancelled their contracts. More localities are in the process of ending their own Flock agreements.

Derek Eder, a trustee on the Oak Park Village Board, wrote a blog post encouraging other local lawmakers to follow his vote, and cut ties to Flock.

“It is the very value of this network, and Flock’s willingness to share and sell access to it, including to the Trump Administration, ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Texas police enforcing anti-abortion laws, that makes this technology so dangerous to not only our immigrant community, but to the entire nation,” Eder wrote.

After Evanston, Illinois cancelled its Flock contract, the company reinstalled readers in the city – which City officials then instructed to be covered in duct tape as Evanston awaited Flock’s removal of the reinstalled readers.

Flock Safety’s conduct and procedures have frequently left local officials around the nation with more questions than answers, resulting in several jurisdictions axing their contracts with the powerful surveillance tool manufacturer whose chief executive believes he can “eliminate all crime” through surveillance.

In June, Central Current reported the Syracuse Police Department had “inadvertently” opted into sharing data with Flock’s national network of thousands of law enforcement agencies. Some of those agencies were actively performing searches and sharing data with federal immigration officials – which some states have found violated their state laws.

Following Central Current’s reporting, Common Councilor Chol Majok in July called a meeting of the council’s Public Safety Committee, which he chairs. At that meeting, Deputy Chief Richard Shoff said the department was in the process of rewriting its rules and regulations, policies, and procedures. 

The department would look to integrate the councilors’ concerns, New York State recommendations, and the recommendations of the mayors’ Surveillance Technology Working Group as SPD updated its overarching guidelines, Shoff said.

The Syracuse Police Department did work with Flock to shut off out-of-state law enforcement agencies from accessing Syracuse’s Flock readers and data, but it is unclear what other changes, if any, the department made following the revelation that Syracuse drivers’ sensitive data appeared in over 4.4 million searches by outside actors.

“Internally here, we kind of understand what’s happening. But how do we help alleviate public apprehensiveness, especially when they heard this was happening?” Majok asked at that Public Safety meeting.

Shoff told Majok that the department was putting together a report on the efficacy of the license plate readers for Syracuse police’s detectives, which Shoff said some councilors had previously requested.

Multiple leaders from the Syracuse Police Department repeatedly assured councilors that the city held full control over the data its Flock readers were collecting. Majok asked if the department had considered performing educational outreach to reassure residents skeptical of the department after the data-sharing snafu.

“We will be posting our policy on our website when it’s finished, so that would be a good place for people to read and see what they’re doing,” Shoff said of the city’s license plate readers.

The department does not appear to have posted that policy anywhere, nor the other documentation that SPD committed to publishing as a condition. 

Syracuse drivers’ data showed up in 175 CBP-related searches until June, when the department closed national access to its database.

“SPD did not enter into a data sharing arrangement with those federal agencies, but they were able to access SPD data through the National Lookup Search tool,” Coffey said at the time.

In the wake of that revelation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the privacy advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project called on the city of Syracuse to terminate its contract with Flock. In an email to Central Current, Coffey at the time said the Syracuse Police Department remained comfortable contracting with Flock.

Councilor Monto stated that in taking action to sever the city’s ties with Flock reflected a distrust of the company, not the police department using its tools.

“For me, this is not a battle between the Common Council and SPD, as much as it is me thinking that in the environment that we’re in right now,” Monto said. “The Flock readers, the possibility of them doing more damage than good, for me, that’s what I’m weighing.”

Williams on Friday echoed Monto’s concerns, citing Flock, not Syracuse police officers, as the problem.

“I joined councilor Monto in looking for a change, because we currently have a company operating within our city that is collecting data on our citizens every minute of every day,” Williams said, “and we’re not quite sure where that data ends up.”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...