What's going on

The Village of Hempstead built a mass surveillance system without telling you.

No one in our community voted on it. The Village installed this system without a public process, a community vote, or a public hearing. The Board of Trustees approved the contract but the residents were never heard.

Cameras that track. The cameras are not triggered by an event, they are constantly recording and logging the movements of everything that comes into its view. That data is then logged and stored in a mazz surveillance database.

Your data leaves Hempstead. Once your plate or your vehicle is scanned here, that data can enter the nationwide Flock database and it is accessed by anybody in the network of thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country. That's including federal agencies. There are no questions asked and no formal process for accessing the information. You have no say in who sees it or how long they keep it or what they use it for. Some cities found that even after cancelling their contracts Flock continued to access and share their data.

Mistakes have created immediate, sometimes irreversible, dangers. License plate readers and Flock devices have misidentified vehicles. There have been people pulled over at gunpoint, they were stopped because their car matched only in plate state and color. So, even if you have "nothing to hide," you still have lot to lose. When you haven't done anything you also have nothing to correct the record with when a system incorrectly points the finger at you.

There is no evidence ALPRs reduce crime. Research has not shown that communities with more cameras have less crime. Flock's own effectiveness claims rely on data it controls and have not been independently verified. The village of Hempstead has not decreased its police budget since installing the Flock network and the cost of overtime continues to go over budget year after year.

There has been no transparency from the village. The Village has never publicly released a list of where the cameras are, how much the contract costs, or what the data retention policy is. They do not list it as "Flock" in the Village Budget so, it cannot be clearly identified or tracked by the public. Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for this information have so far been ignored.

Who Decides Who Is Suspicious?

The government has a long history of watching Black and Brown communities — not to keep us safe, but to keep us quiet.

1956 – 1971

COINTELPRO

An FBI run secret program to spy on and disrupt Black Organizations.

1990s – 2013

Stop and Frisk

New York City police stopped and searched millions of people. Nearly 9 out of 10 were Black or Latino. Nearly 9 out of 10 had done nothing wrong.

2003 – 2014

NYPD Muslim Surveillance

After 9/11, the NYPD secretly mapped and monitored Muslim communities across New York and New Jersey, mosques, restaurants, student groups and more. There was no crime or suspicion, just religion.

You don't get to decide what looks suspicious tomorrow.

Just because you're not doing anything wrong doesn't mean you will be excluded from the harm of mass surveillance. These systems don't consider or care about intentions, only your movments. So, a simple walk past a place or event flagged in the system or a misread plate can mark you as "suspicious."

Mistakes happen, and real people are the ones who pay for them.

Automated License Plate Readers are not always accurate. People have been pulled over at gunpoint, arrested, or detained because a camera misread a plate or flagged the wrong car. When the system is wrong, and no one cares to check it...there's no easy way to correct it and you may not even know it happened, until it is too late.

So, how many Flock connected devices are in the Village of Hempstead?

~530

This is an estimate because the Village of Hempstead has never released an official device inventory.

The cost of the contract has never been publicly disclosed and the data retention policy which determines how long your information is stored and who accesses it has never been published.

The 530 figure was independently derived from flocksurveillance.org

Active Flock surveillance devices inside the Village of Hempstead are in approx. 3.7 square miles for 55,000 residents.