The Dispatch
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Across the country, there are growing concerns about license plate reader cameras and how police departments share the data they capture.
Campus, local, and state police departments that use the cameras — many of which are manufactured by Flock Safety — say they’re a necessary crime-fighting tool. Critics say the invasion of privacy and data-sharing potential of the devices put communities and campuses at risk, especially their vulnerable residents.
Flock cameras scan the license plate, color, and model of every car that passes by. The photos are stored in an online database, and Flock says the cameras’ owners control access.
In lots of places, such as Anoka County in Minnesota and Alameda County in California, residents and civic leaders are clashing with local government officials inking Flock contracts. Critics have raised significant privacy concerns as the technology spreads and as local and state police departments share the data between themselves and elsewhere. Police have shared camera data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and used it to track patients seeking reproductive care.
FOIAball, a newsletter that uses public records to report on college sports, recently found 75 colleges and universities with ties to Flock. There are almost certainly many more since the company has said it has contracts with more than 7,000 law enforcement agencies. The University of Arizona, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are among those with multi-year deals.
So far, the disputes on campuses are playing out in a range of ways. Following backlash, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department announced last month it would remove its Flock cameras. Kent State University said this spring it wouldn’t sign a long-term Flock contract after its trial ended. Meanwhile Ohio State University has just renewed its six-figure, 63-camera Flock contract for two more years, Amy Morona reported at our partner Signal Ohio.
The universities Amy talked to said the technology is one way they’re keeping students safe. Not everybody agrees. Case Western Reserve University student Gregg Chase said he finds the cameras unsettling. He’s working with other students to try and persuade the university to end its Flock contract and develop and maintain its own more secure network of cameras. (Stanford University recently announced it would make this switch.)
“I want those amazingly diverse friends of mine to be able to feel safe on their college campus, and I know that right now they don’t,” Chase said.
In response to criticism, Flock Safety recently announced that police departments can now restrict what camera data other law enforcement agencies can see, such as barring access to data for immigration violations.
It remains to be seen how significant that policy change is in practice. But we already know of instances where police have searched Flock data from cameras on college campuses.
About 3,480 law enforcement agencies searched the cameras at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke more than 1.5 million times between April and July of this year, before the new controls existed. UNC Pembroke only searched the cameras a few hundred times in that period, according to public records that Mark Spencer Williams — a Wilmington, N.C. attorney — shared with the Border Belt Independent.
“A camera on a rural North Carolina campus is, in practice, a node in a nationwide dragnet,” the citizen-led group DeFlockILM, which Williams oversees, told the Border Belt Independent.
Flock has also shortened the default data-retention time for new contracts.
“We are not perfect, so we will keep listening, improving, and building a better standard for public safety technology together,” the announcement said.
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Elsewhere on Open Campus
From Minnesota: A $131 million budget shortfall that lawmakers can’t agree how to fix means that thousands of Minnesota college students could receive smaller amounts of money from a popular state-run grant program — and some may lose the money entirely.
Growing demand and rising tuition costs at the state’s public colleges are contributing to the budget crunch. Cleo Krejci, an investigative reporter covering community colleges as part of a collaboration between MinnPost and Open Campus, dug into it. (Learn more about our Community College Project here.)
It’s the fourth consecutive fiscal year that there’s been a budget deficit in the State Grant Program, the largest pot of money Minnesota has available to defray the costs of college. Through the program, the state doled out $222 million in aid to more than 75,000 students in fiscal year 2025.
This fall, 80% of grant recipients could lose aid money and somewhere between 17,000 to 20,000 students could see their grants eliminated entirely, state officials estimate.
Meghan Flores, who oversees financial aid programs for the Office of Higher Education, told Cleo that she doesn’t want students to panic, as other state programs can help fill gaps.
Still, she said, “It’s very difficult when we know there are capable, smart, talented students in our communities that want to go to our colleges, and that have legitimate need for help to pay, and we don’t have enough dollars to give.”
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