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Florida cops say they don't know who owns 11 unpermitted Flock cameras
Floridians alarmed by 14 mysterious Flock cameras; 11 have no clear owner.
Florida cops are facing questions after a mandate to remove all Flock cameras tracking cars on St. Lucie County roads led local police to uncover more than a dozen suspicious cameras operating without permits.
Local residents told The Washington Post that they were alarmed that no one knows who owns many of the mysterious cameras.
Of the 14 cameras found, 11 had no obvious owners, raising concerns about who has access to sensitive data that bad actors could abuse. After the cameras were discovered, St. Lucie County Commissioner James Clasby told a local news outlet that there’s “potential for non-law enforcement to have cameras out there, and I’m not OK with that.”
But the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office ended up claiming three of those cameras, then refused to explain why they never obtained the required permits. The office did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to clarify whether it ever accessed data recorded by the cameras.
In Florida, police have repeatedly been caught misusing Flock cameras, sometimes tracking single cars hundreds of times for personal reasons. One officer in Fort Pierce, Josepher Crutchfield, accessed a Flock database 382 times while stalking an ex-girlfriend, the Post noted, while another cop, Christopher Goodson, reportedly nearly doubled that number of searches while looking for his estranged wife.
Two Pinellas County cops were arrested for invasive Flock tracking, with one, Travis Stanton, found searching a minor and the other, Karl Gwynne, stalking a woman he wanted to date. Across the US, the Post has found at least 50 cases of similar police misuse. As the problem has escalated, Flock has claimed that it has added safeguards to prevent police misuse of its databases, but experts warn they’re ineffective.
For St. Lucie County residents who frequently pass the unpermitted cameras, privacy concerns remain, as the county is giving owners 30 days to remove the cameras, seemingly with no questions asked. One camera already came down, a Post reporter confirmed, after St. Lucie County’s interim administrator Mayte Santamaria explained that the county put up “bright red” notices.
Cops remain uncertain if the cameras are actively collecting data, the Post reported. Until the deadline arrives—which for some cameras could be as late as October 20—county spokesperson Erick Gill told the Post that “staff plan to start placing plastic bags over the cameras.”
That small step could help obscure footage to prevent invasive tracking, but one resident, Ty Grant, told the Post that concerns remain—even about the camera that was promptly removed. For people potentially recorded by the cameras, it’s imperative that cops try to figure out who owns them, Grant said.