A Flock Safety license plate reader remains installed on East Adams Street weeks after Flock was supposed to remove them from Syracuse's rights-of-way. Flock and Syracuse police say the readers are no longer active. City officials are working to replace Flock readers with readers made by Axon Enterprise. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current

Syracuse Police Chief Mark Rusin committed to fulfilling a promise made by his department four years ago to publish its license plate reader policy and regular reports of how it used those tools.

The policy was the primary transparency measure recommended by the city’s hand-picked technology experts when the city decided it wanted to use the readers. 

But the city put up Flock Safety license plate readers, used Flock readers for two years, took them down and contracted with a second license plate reader provider before ever publishing the policy on the website. 

Department officials have long said they would put the policy on the website. As recently as July 2025, then-Deputy Chief Richard Shoff told a Central Current reporter he expected the policy would be posted to its website in the coming weeks. At that same meeting, department representatives explained to councilors how the department had inadvertently opted into sharing data with thousands of out-of-city entities. 

Chief Mark Rusin, who took over the department in January, said he plans to increase transparency as the department looks to install 26 new license plate readers from Axon Enterprise. In an interview with Central Current, Rusin outlined his plans to make Syracuse’s next license plate reader program more transparent than its last under Flock Safety. 

Rusin confirmed that before the Axon readers go live, the policy governing their use will be posted on the department’s website for the city to review. The department is working with Axon to create a transparency portal to publicize relevant data on license plate readers’ utility in criminal investigations.

“There’s a couple of things that I want to add to the policy to make some modifications to it. One is the portal. That one’s really important to me, the transparency portal,” Rusin said. “The other thing is like an internal audit.”

The department’s compliance unit will review quarterly audits of officers’ license plate readers usage, Rusin said, ensuring that officers are logging reasons for ALPR queries and that those searches are for legitimate purposes.

Johannes Himmelreich, a Syracuse University professor with expertise in data science ethics and artificial intelligence governance, sits on the city’s Surveillance Technology Working Group. He voted to recommend qualified approval of the department’s request for license plate readers, expecting the police department to adhere to the group’s recommended transparency measures. That included posting the policy online, Himmelreich said. 

“Policing is built on trust and cannot happen in the dark. We can’t have secret regulations. That’s not how rule of law works,” Himmelreich said. “Technology deployment must be transparent, the policy and audits must be public.”

Himmelreich said it was “hard to understand” why the final policy is not public, given that SPD in 2022 developed a draft policy ahead of a license plate reader pilot program that never materialized.

The recommendation that Walsh approved instructed the police department to report annually on its ALPR practices and usage to the mayor’s office and the working group. It also instructed the police department to conspicuously post each report on the police department’s website and the working group’s website.

Along with the policy, the Surveillance Technology Working Group recommended extensive reports from the police department on how its license plate readers were being used, how often they were assisting in crime, their accuracy rate, and false matches.

Those reports are supposed to include:

  • the locations and specifications of all cameras used for the ALPR system .
  • the number of license plates scanned.
  • the total number of incidents investigated in which an LPR match was generated, total number of incidents investigated that did not generate a match, the number of confirmed matches, and the number of matches that upon further investigation did not correlate to an alert.
  • of all incidents investigated that had related ALPR matches, related offenses that were verified subsequent to the match, broken out by offense type, subsequent arrests that occurred in relation to those offenses, broken out by arrest type, charges filed subsequent to related arrests.
  • the number of manually-entered license plate numbers, broken down by incident type, % of entries that have a stated reason, % of entries that have a corresponding DR#, number of confirmed matches and the number of matches that upon further investigation did not correlate to an alert.
  • any changes to the ALPR system or to the use or privacy policy.
  • data on accuracy, including date and time, for each instance of a false match.

“ALPR cameras take photos of everyone. This is surveillance with a wide net,” Himmelreich said. “So everyone has a right to know where these cameras are and what they are doing.”

Local police accountability advocate Barrie Gewanter said that she is pleased that the policies for most of the police department’s operations are on the website, but said the lack of a conspicuously published ALPR policy hinders the public’s ability to research policies. 

Gewanter — who is involved in efforts to keep Syracuse’s Citizen Review Board running as the city’s lawyers recommend that independent oversight body halt operations — connected the missing ALPR information to the CRB fight. 

In the review board’s last meeting, data analyst Chris Fierro explained that Right to Know quarterly reports for 2025 and 2026 had not been posted on SPD’s website. The CRB notified the police department that the data appeared to be missing, and the department has since published those reports.

Gewanter argued that by not publishing policies, relevant data, and mandated reports, the police department was denying both regular citizens and a government oversight body to independently review and assess the police department’s practices.

“It’s a denial of public oversight — not just public access, but the ability of a designated body of the city to engage in independent review of policies and procedures,” Gewanter said.

The police department is in the process of migrating its policies to a different page on its website, Rusin said, which should streamline public access to those documents.

Jillian Moczara, a local activist, said in a message to Central Current that concerned citizens and taxpayers around the country are looking for greater transparency from their governments and police departments regarding surveillance. 

Local activists since January have called on the Syracuse government to bring greater transparency to surveillance policing initiatives in the wake of reporting from Central Current that revealed how outside entities — including federal immigration agents and Flock Safety itself — were able to access and use Syracuse’s data through Flock’s systems.

“It is my hope that the Syracuse Police Department can correct the oversight of not having published the data and policies that it has pledged to,” Moczara said. “Taxpayers deserve to know to what aims our data is being utilized, how often, and who it is shared with.”

A timeline of Central Current’s Flock Safety coverage

Read more of Central Current’s coverage

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...