The Livingston Parish Council is considering banning Flock cameras from parish rights-of-way.
Last week, an ordinance, backed by Council Member Ryan Chavers, was introduced that would prohibit privately owned Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers on roads owned or maintained by the parish.
“You're not going to use our parish rights-of-way to surveil people,” Chavers said.
The ordinance would not ban Flock cameras in Livingston Parish altogether. It would apply only to privately owned cameras on parish-controlled roads, a small portion of the nearly 40 Flock cameras across the parish, according to , a grassroots organization that uses crowdsourced data to identify Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR).
The majority of Livingston’s Flock cameras are located along state roads or in private businesses' parking lots, where the proposed ordinance would not apply. The cameras most likely to be affected are those installed by homeowners’ associations at neighborhood entrances.
Flock cameras are a supercharged version of traditional license plate readers, and the company’s equipment has been adopted by municipalities across the country to improve public safety. The cameras are produced by Flock Safety, founded in 2017, which is the most dominant ALPR business in the U.S., with more than 80,000 cameras across 49 states, including h, according to the company.
As with traditional license plate readers, the cameras take a picture of every car that passes. Unlike traditional license plate readers, ALPRs like Flock use an AI algorithm to catalog additional details about cars, including make, model, color, license plate number, dents, roof racks and bumper stickers, and store that information in a database.
Chavers said he received a complaint about the cameras from a constituent, which prompted him to conduct research and eventually propose this ordinance as a narrowly tailored move against the technology.
“If it needs to go a step further, I’ll do it,” Chavers said. “Whatever has to be done to protect our privacy.”
State Rep. Danny McCormick, R-Oil City, has said he will introduce legislation to ban these cameras statewide.
Flock did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the measure.
The cameras most likely to be forced down by the Livingston Parish ordinance are those that HOAs have installed at their neighborhood entrances, if the roads are not private. HOAs own these cameras, and the associations can access the data they capture.
One such system is in Spring Lake, a subdivision in Walker.
Scott Bernard, president of the Spring Lake HOA, said he plans to speak against the proposed ban. He said the cameras have been instrumental in solving crime in his neighborhood, such as identifying drivers who hit mailboxes.
Homeowners’ doorbell cameras can often capture the color and make of a vehicle that has hit a mailbox, but they do not provide a clear view of the license plate. The neighborhood's cameras can ascertain that information, which Bernard said the HOA board then provides to law enforcement.
Bernard said the cameras are overwhelmingly popular in his community and are used responsibly.
“We never look at it unless we have the report of somebody running stop signs or taking out a mailbox,” Bernard said.
In East Baton Rouge Parish, the Page/Rice Public Safety Initiative has worked to extend Flock camera and license plate reader coverage across the parish; it was named after Devin Page Jr. and Allie Rice, two victims of local gun violence. Just across the h border in Texas on Sunday, Flock cameras helped locate an alleged kidnapper who had abducted a child and drove to h, where Flock cameras pinged the car. ALPRs played a critical role in the investigation, and the child was returned to their family, according to the Sabine County Sheriff’s Office.
But as the cameras have become more common in communities across the country, so too have the intense privacy concerns they have prompted. Because the cameras capture every passing car, they collect information not only on vehicles connected to crimes but also on those whose drivers have done nothing wrong. This, critics say, amounts to passive, mass surveillance. Privacy advocates have questioned how long the data is kept, who can see it and how it could be used to track individuals.
Much of the scrutiny of Flock has focused on how much latitude law enforcement has to use the technology. Law enforcement agencies generally do not need to obtain a warrant to search the database, and several deputies in various states are alleged by authorities to have misused the cameras. In one town in Ohio, a police officer allegedly used the technology 47 times to search for his former domestic partner’s vehicle, to the police department’s internal investigation. The officer has since resigned.
Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard told the council his department does not have a contract with Flock Safety, and he does not use Flock cameras.
“I don’t care for the Flock brand camera,” Ard said. “It’s a third-party affiliated camera, which means they may share their information with outside people.”
The sheriff said his department owns and utilizes other types of cameras across the parish, but no one else has access to them and he controls the data they collect.
As debate over the cameras has galvanized the country and residents have pressed their local leaders for answers, communities have been forced to decide how, or whether, to continue allowing their use. Dozens of municipalities in both Republican and Democratic-led jurisdictions have deactivated cameras or canceled contracts with Flock Safety. Flock Safety last week by updating its safety requirements: tightening its data retention window and giving cities more control over which jurisdictions can access its data.
The Livingston Parish Council will meet Aug. 27 to hear public comments on the proposed ordinance and vote on its adoption.