Killingworth will soon end its contract with Flock Safety for automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras.
According to Killingworth First Selectman Eric Couture, he is currently negotiating an early end to the town’s contract with Flock as the town has entered a new fiscal year and does not have funding for the license. The town’s 2025-2026 budget contained $14,600 in funding for four Flock Falcon cameras. Those cameras are located along Route 81.
Meeting minutes from a June 8 Board of Selectmen (BOS) meeting state the town’s contract with Flock expired on July 1, but Couture told Inside Investigator that is not when the contract actually ends. He added that the cameras along Route 81 are likely to be removed this month, but that there is currently no specific timeframe.
During debate of the contract during the June 8 BOS meeting, there was discussion of “annual cost, privacy and also FOI-related concerns” in the town’s decision not to renew the contract.
Couture told Inside Investigator that when the BOS and Killingworth Board of Finance discussed entering into a contract with Flock in 2025 they had privacy concerns but they were calmed by the answers they received at the time.
“However, more stories have come out since the initial contract about how Flock information sharing is being abused by the current federal administration and law enforcement in other states. That new information led us to reevaluate the contract as we prepared the budget, alongside resident concerns about the cameras.” Couture said.
Couture also said that the town initially anticipated having some support from the Connecticut State Police to handle Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, as the town is supported by a resident state trooper out of the Troop F barracks; however, that turned out not to be the case. According to Couture, the town does not have a large staff, so FOIA requests related to Flock take up time “that could otherwise be better utilized.”
“So with the FOI and privacy concerns, alongside just how little utility the cameras wound up adding to our Trooper’s toolkit, the cost benefit did not work out. It is not a huge expense, but for a town such as ours with a budget as lean as ours we were not seeing enough benefit to continue.” Couture stated.
Killingworth is not the first town in the state to end its contract with Flock. On February 17, Windsor’s town council voted 8 to 1 to shut off its 16 Flock cameras, citing concerns about privacy and access to data by out-of-state law enforcement agencies.
Windsor had limited access to its data to Connecticut police or bordering law enforcement agencies within a 100-mile radius and granted access to agencies farther away on a case-by-case basis as approved by the chief of police. However, reporting from CT Insider, which looked at data from six police departments in Connecticut, including Windsor, found town data was searched hundreds of times by out-of-state law enforcement officials for immigration enforcement purposes.
Legislators passed a law in May prohibiting the use of ALPR data for immigration enforcement and to track or investigate anyone seeking reproductive or gender affirming healthcare, or to investigate protestors exercising their First Amendment rights. The law also limits who Connecticut agencies may share ALPR data with to other Connecticut agencies or law enforcement in neighboring New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
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