Long Island cops ran nearly 3K manual searches through Flock database in one month: attorney
Long Island police departments ran nearly 3,000 searches in just one month through Flock’s database — a controversial AI-powered surveillance system that’s blanketed over the region, according to new data. Nassau County police ran 1,112 searches in Flock’s database in June while Suffolk County PD searched another 1,194 times and District Attorney Ray Tierney added 500 more, according to audit data obtained and shared by Hempstead-based defense attorney Richard Hochhauser. “I practice criminal and DWI defense in Hempstead, and over the last two years the phrase ‘license plate reader’ has gone from an occasional footnote in a police report to a routine part of how cases begin,” Hochhauser warned of the surveillance system and its ever-growing expansion. The total number of searches in the database by officers between the agencies hit 2,794 in just those 30 days alone, he said.It doesn’t include when a car is automatically flagged by the system and only counts manual queries an officer actively runs by typing in a plate, a date range or a location in the database to pull up a vehicle’s movement history, according to the report. The logs detailing why the searches were made, according to the report, ranged from ordinary traffic violations all the way to “suspected terrorism.”Flock Safety uses smart cameras to scan and store info on every car that drives past, including license plates and distinct features like dents and bumper stickers.The data is then searchable and able to be used to track a vehicle’s movements.On Long Island alone, there are over 700 Flock cameras installed over 100 miles between the Queens border and Montauk, with thousands more throughout the five boroughs, according to DeFlock, an activist group tracking the company’s surveillance and expansion. Hochhauser, a former Nassau County prosecutor turned defense attorney, pointed out New York state currently has no laws governing how long the data can be kept, who can ...