Syracuse police have been searching Flock Safety's license plate reader database, according to publicly available records. One expert said that means Syracuse police would have had to opted in to sharing its own data with the nearly 6,000 law enforcement agencies who use Flock. Credit: Courtesy of Flock Safety

When Mayor Ben Walsh and the Syracuse Common Council last year allowed the Syracuse Police Department to install over two dozen Flock Safety license plate readers, Walsh and the council did so with the understanding that SPD would establish strict guidelines on the data collected by the readers.

But an expert’s review of a publicly available Flock Safety license plate reader database shows Syracuse may be sharing driver and license plate data with nearly 6,000 other law enforcement agencies. Some of those agencies have searched the database on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to reporting from 404 Media. 

Conor Healy, the director of government research at security and surveillance research firm IPVM, said an audit of searches of Flock’s database shows Syracuse police searching other law enforcement agency’s data. 

Flock writes two-way data sharing agreements, meaning that a law enforcement organization has to share its data with nearly 6,000 agencies for the opportunity to also search the database, Healy said. A Flock user guide from August 2023 seems to show that to access other organizations’ databases is contingent on a police department making its own data accessible.

“So one of those searches shows Syracuse, NY, PD searched 5,800-something Flock networks,” Healy wrote. “Now the Flock data-sharing agreement is two-way, so that would mean that Syracuse, NY PD is, in turn, sharing data with at least 5,800+ other users.”

Flock Safety spokesman Josh Thomas declined to confirm whether Syracuse police agreed to share its data with other law enforcement agencies.

Syracuse Police Deputy Chief Richard Shoff on Tuesday acknowledged the potential that the department had opted into Flock’s data-sharing feature, and said the department was reviewing its policies and would know more by Wednesday morning. 

“So that’s the kind of stuff we’re working on to find out if that’s true, and if it is, how to get out of it. Because we don’t want to be in that.” Shoff said. “… We’re working this stuff out.”

The situation is one that Mark King, a data consultant and member of Mayor Ben Walsh’s Surveillance Technology Working Group — a team of city employees and community stakeholders who review powerful technology before the city implements it — foresaw last year and warned of. 

Shoff also serves on the working group, and told a Central Current reporter Tuesday the department does not want to disrespect the group’s recommendations.

King said the data-sharing revelations are no surprise to him, because crowdsourcing surveillance data to track vehicle movements is a marketed feature of Flock’s products.

“The potential for creating such a database is one of the reasons that I voted against it,” King said. “This large-scale amassing of data on the movement of Americans should bother anyone, regardless of how they feel about immigration.”

A study found Syracuse’s new license plate readers make frequent mistakes. Councilors didn’t know before approving them.

The public records that show Syracuse police officers searching Flock’s database were obtained by 404 Media, a news organization covering technology and cybersecurity. 

404 Media’s investigation into data-sharing within Flock’s license plate reader network began with a slew of data from the Danville Police Department in Illinois, which researchers obtained through a public records request.

The researchers received an ‘organizational audit’ and a ‘network audit’; the first audit contains all searches performed by Danville officers. The second audit contains all searches performed by outside agencies.

The Danville data logs show that agencies around the nation were regularly searching Danville’s Flock database. When a law enforcement agency searches other agencies’ databases, the requesting agency must provide a reason. Thousands of the reasons provided for lookups were related to immigration or ICE. 

Though Flock does not have a contract with ICE, 404 Media’s reporting has shown how law enforcement officers are helping ICE agents access license plate reader data – sometimes in jurisdictions where assisting ICE on immigration operations is forbidden by law.

404 Media also recently reported that a Texas cop used Flock’s nationwide network to search for a woman who received an abortion, even searching the network in a state where abortion is legal. 

King, the data consultant, and other members of the Surveillance Technology Working Group worried about potential abuses of Syracuse’s license plate readers when the technology came before the group.

The working group – which includes Shoff, Syracuse Fire Chief Michael Monds, and Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens – voted to approve the program on the condition that the department follow strict stipulations regarding data collection, storage, and sharing.

Walsh supported the group’s recommendations for qualified approval. 

If the department opted into a data-sharing agreement, it would have defied a clear stipulation from the group, King said.

“The members of the Surveillance Technology working group were well aware of the risks to privacy that such data sharing would create and discussed them at length,” King said. “The recommendation sent to the mayor, which he accepted, included language intended to prevent that kind of interdepartmental sharing (except in cases of a warrant, of course). It was very important to us that Syracuse data should not leave Syracuse.”

With an eye toward transparency, the mayor’s technology group instructed the department to publish its official policy for its license plate readers.

No policy on the license plate reader program or any other surveillance technology is available on Syracuse police’s website. The department also has not published an annual report on license plate readers and does not appear to have posted a department-wide annual report since 2022. 

The technology working group also advised the department to publish the following:

  • 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; 
  • the number 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.

The Syracuse Police Department does not appear to have publicly published any of the above

Syracuse’s Flock license plate readers faced an uncertain future before 404 Media’s investigation.

Police Chief Joseph Cecile and Walsh mentioned the department’s license plate reader program among a list of programs that may be cut from the police department’s budget in response to the Common Council’s extensive cuts to the 2025-2026 city budget.

It remains unclear to what extent, if any, the Syracuse Police Department has granted outside access to the data it collects on Syracuse drivers. If it has, though, the department may have to reckon with the community stakeholders on the mayor’s technology review group.

“The Surveillance Technology Working Group definitely needs to ask questions about how the recommendations have been implemented and whether they are being followed,” King said.

Daniel Schwarz, a community stakeholder on the working group, agreed. Schwarz is a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union. He, along with King, voted against the license plate readers during the working group’s review. Schwarz said he and the group are “in the dark” when it comes to guardrails the city has implemented on license plate readers. 

Johannes Himmelreich, a Syracuse University professor and working group community stakeholder with expertise in technology ethics, said he was unsure how binding the group’s recommendations are. He pointed out that the mayor himself endorsed them when he granted the department qualified approval for the license plate readers.

If Syracuse police shared data through Flock’s database, Himmelreich said that would “seem to (Himmelreich) to be a clear and unfortunate violation of our recommendation.” 

“Either the Mayor didn’t follow the recommendations, or the SPD didn’t follow policy.”

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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...