Knee-jerk Flock panic threatens a tool thats making our cities safer

We have met the enemy — and it is watching us. There’s a growing backlash against Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers that have become ubiquitous across the country. The cameras take images of license plates and store them in a searchable database that police departments can query in the course of their investigations. Opponents of the cameras consider them an instrument of Big Brother, who’s not only watching, but constantly recording and tracking.Vandals have disabled and stolen the Flock cameras, and even shot them.There’s a movement to get jurisdictions to cancel their contracts with Flock (the leading such company, but not the only one), and it’s met with some success. Los Angeles just let its contract with Flock lapse, citing “serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues.” There’s a reason, though, that police departments so rapidly adopted the cameras — they are an extremely useful investigative tool.It is certainly true that the technology, like any power we give the police, can be mis-used.According to The Washington Post, “Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk their exes.” The Post calls the abuse “rampant,” but 50 documented cases isn’t a large number given the widespread use of these devices: There are 120,000 Flock cameras across the United States scanning license plates 20 billion times a month. It is understandable that people don’t like the idea that they are, in effect, living in a panopticon.But license plate readers aren’t the only offender.There are all sorts of other surveillance cameras, many of them privately owned and operated, that the police access during investigations.We let our mobile phones and various apps track us all day long.And something like 60 million households have Ring or other security cameras that record what’s happening on their property, ...