The Colchester Board of Selectmen considered a proposal by both their police department and State Police to install Flock Safety cameras in town, with police who patrol Colchester saying it would give them the ability to better solve crimes, while residents raised privacy concerns and the fact that Colchester police had begun testing the system without a memorandum of understanding approved by the board.
The Flock Safety system utilizes cameras that capture the license plates and other features of every car that passes and uploads the information to a database accessible by all law enforcement units with access to the system through real-time alerts. The camera system is not used for facial recognition or traffic enforcement. Flock is currently being used in towns like Southington and West Hartford, and the use of license plate reading technology and real-time crime centers utilizing camera systems are on the rise.
Colchester police, who are supervised and supported by CT State Police Troop K, have already engaged in a test run with Flock under an unsigned memorandum of understanding (MOU) that was never approved by the board of selectmen. The test began under the previous town’s First Selectman Andreas Bisbikos. First Selectman Bernard Dennler, elected in 2023, said he learned of the test program when he came into office.
Under the MOU no cameras were installed, but police were given access to the database and, according to officer Dominic Sullivan, on the very first day of operation, the system was used by Colchester police to help find a missing person, and help solve a vehicle break-in.
Sullivan said coverage of 50 square miles of Colchester is difficult with only two officers on patrol at a given time, while Resident State Trooper Zach Cash said Colchester has the highest crime rate and accident rate “by far” of the towns covered by Troop K.
“It’s going to allow us to see areas that we otherwise would not be seeing and help us investigate crimes that have occurred,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to direct our resources to places we need to be to prevent or at least be in the area where something could potentially occur.”
Cash said license plate reader technology is already in use by police departments and even businesses like car washes throughout the state and can be used to handle hit-and-run vehicle accidents as well.
“It’s out there and we’re just trying to get with the times to give us a little help solving some of these crimes,” Cash said. “We want to be able to provide the best service possible.”
The one-year contract with Flock would cost roughly $10,000 and would involve three cameras placed at “busy intersections” throughout the town of 15,000 residents. The meeting also included a presentation by Jonathan Paz, government affairs manager for Flock.
Paz said the information captured by Flock cameras is “hard deleted” after thirty days, meaning that information captured unrelated to any crime would disappear. “This technology can be a force multiplier and it can provide objective evidence to the right user,” Paz said. “Trust is very important when you have unbiased data to solve crime.”
“We don’t own the data as Flock, your community owns the data,” Paz said. “This is your data and will be on your police department to have its own policy, and we do not store it longer than thirty days, it is automatically deleted.”
However, community members speaking at the hearing were less enthusiastic, expressing privacy concerns and citing research by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which wrote in a 2022 white paper that Flock is a mass government surveillance system driven by artificial intelligence, raising not only privacy concerns but also concerns over the system’s accuracy and the fact that it feeds into a national database controlled by Flock.
“By pulling all the data recorded by its customers —including its police customers —into its own centralized servers, Flock not only creates an enormously powerful private-public machine sweeping up data on Americans’ activities, but puts itself at that machine’s center. It’s bad enough when law enforcement engages in such mass surveillance, but to have such data flowing through a private company creates an additional set of incentives for abuse,” wrote Jay Stanley of the ACLU in a white paper.
Colchester resident Deanna Bouchard raised concerns over the MOU with Flock, saying that since it was never signed or approved by the board of selectmen may “have opened the town up to some liability” if the town used unapproved technology to arrest individuals for crimes.
“I’m not a fan of this technology,” Bouchard said. “The police officers in this town engaged in Flock surveillance without a signed MOU. I’m going to guess that the criminals caught using this technology probably have a really good avenue, if their attorneys know, to come back to this town.”
Former selectmen Jason LaChappelle also spoke out against the town contracting with Flock, saying it was a violation of Fourth Amendment rights and that the data is uploaded to a centralized, national system.
“This isn’t meta-data, this is legitimate data that can be tracked to a human person,” LaChapelle said, adding that he didn’t believe it was an issue that should even come up for discussion and that the board of selectmen should not be seeking “accurate information” from the company selling the product.
One resident who spoke at the meeting said a neighbor shot a bullet through his bedroom while he and his wife were sleeping with children in the house. Although the neighbor was arrested, he is currently out on bond.
“I live next to this person every day,” the resident said, who asked that no one mention this fact to his children because they are not aware of what happened. “It doesn’t matter what these cameras do, whatever work these officers do in their jobs, it is going to go to the criminal justice system, which is a lethargic, broken, pile of trash.”
“The return on investment is an arrest with a conviction and in this state, you’re not going to get it, I promise you,” he said. “The people in Hartford do not care about crime.”
The Board of Selectmen and First Selectman Dennler were critical of the pre-existing MOU and town staff practices that seemed to ignore policies and procedures for executing contracts.
“That MOU is useless,” said selectman Art Shilosky adding that it was never approved by the board but was instead signed by the resident state trooper. “That bothers me. That really bothers me. The only people that are authorized to sign these MOUs is the first selectman with instructions by the board of selectmen.”
“I’ll do anything I can to help our police department make the town safer, but procedures need to be followed,” Shilosky continued.
Dennler said he was “not aware of the circumstances around the MOU prior to this,” and that he has addressed the practice of department head and staff signing contracts without board approval.
“It should have happened at an earlier stage but now we need to decide our direction as a town,” Dennler said. “Whether it was turnover or other factors that somehow staff had fallen out of compliance with policies and procedures in this town, and as a result, I have been very direct with department heads in our department head meetings about what is expected of them.”
While Flock has been growing in popularity both nationally and in Connecticut with more and more police departments and homeowner associations utilizing the technology, crime remains a political issue in Connecticut, particularly following the pandemic, with state Democrats pointing to statistics showing crime is decreasing since a pandemic spike, while Republicans highlight car jackings, break-ins and thefts as ongoing problems being ignored by the majority party.
The Connecticut General Assembly voted in 2023 to allow municipalities to install red-light and speed cameras to help prevent pedestrian deaths, which had raised similar privacy concerns among opponents, including the ACLU of Connecticut. Thus far, no town has installed them, although New Haven is taking steps to move forward.
“It’s a force-multiplier to have a system like this and solve these crimes,” Cash said. “The Troop obviously can’t cover all three towns at one time and having technology that could also help us solve crime but act as a deterrent.”
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