// WIRED US/UK — FINANZA
The Cop Who Took On Flock
On an early fall afternoon in 2023, midway through a shift in Pawtucket’s District Five, Rhode Island police officer Noel Pichardo noticed a strange camera perched on a utility pole over West Avenue.
Pichardo was 28, five years into the job, and alone in his cruiser during one of the brief lulls between responding to the typical churn of radio calls for domestic disputes, petty disturbances, and welfare checks. The camera was compact and solar-powered, angled down toward passing traffic. Pichardo made a U-turn and drove beneath it again, more slowly this time, to get a better look.
He then began searching for the cameras on roads near highway ramps, at major intersections, along the routes into and out of the city. He found them again and again. By the time Pichardo finished circling the district, he knew exactly where he had seen them before.
Two years earlier, officers had gathered on the second floor of a small police substation in Pawtucket for a presentation about a surveillance system made by Flock Safety. A high-ranking police official stood in front of a PowerPoint and explained that the company’s automatic license plate readers could identify passing vehicles not only by their license plates but by bumper stickers, roof racks, and other distinguishing features. Investigators could search for a particular car across jurisdictions and, camera by camera, reconstruct where it had been.
The system was presented as another tool of routine police work, a way to recover stolen cars, locate suspects, and find missing people. But as Pichardo listened, he found himself thinking less about the vehicles police wanted than about all the others. In a medium-size city like Pawtucket, where a handful of roads carried people nearly everywhere they needed to go, a record of a car’s movements amounted to a record of a person’s life—the places they visited, the people they saw, the routines they followed.
As Pichardo understood it, the Flock proposal had gone nowhere because the city could not afford a permanent installation. So he let it slip from his mind.
But now, on that afternoon on West Avenue, the cameras were all over his district.
Pawtucket’s cameras are one small piece of a sprawling vehicle-surveillance system that touches nearly every state in the country. Flock markets its platform as the nation’s largest fixed license-plate-reader network, processing billions of sightings each month. Because departments can open their records to agencies elsewhere, a camera installed by one municipality can become searchable by investigators hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In 2021, around the time of Pichardo’s training, Flock offered Pawtucket police a free 60-day pilot. Seventeen cameras went up around the city as part of a regional test that also included Cranston and Woonsocket, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The rollout quickly drew criticism. The ACLU of Rhode Island accused the department of installing the cameras surreptitiously, after the pilot began without prior public input or notice to the city council. Pawtucket chief of police Tina Goncalves later apologized, saying that the department would “work better in the future” to communicate with the city council.
The pilot ended later that year, and in May 2023 the local TV news reported that Pawtucket was not moving forward with the installation. Pichardo believed the idea was a dead letter.