Four Flock Safety cameras in the Long Island town of Southold were vandalized in July, as resistance to the license-plate-reading technology intensifies across the country — including a recent Georgia scandal in which a police supervisor allegedly used the system to track her boyfriend.
The AI-powered cameras on Long Island’s East End were targeted during a broader surge of anti-Flock sentiment, Southold Police Chief Steve Grattan confirmed to The Post, with similar acts of vandalism reported in other states.
“We had two cameras vandalized on July 4 weekend — both had paint splattered on them and one had the wires unplugged,” Grattan said.
The damage continued days later. “This past Monday evening, one of the cameras was run over by a vehicle and another had the wires unplugged,” he added.
Police also found that another Flock camera on Main Road in Peconic had been turned away from the street, though investigators could not confirm whether it was deliberately moved or knocked out of position by recent storms.
Flock’s camera network has drawn scrutiny because the system can help track vehicles using identifying details such as dents, bumper stickers and roof racks — fueling privacy and Fourth Amendment concerns, especially after widely reported cases of alleged misuse by law enforcement.
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In Georgia, 18 police officers have recently been arrested for allegedly misusing Flock Safety camera data, including a supervisor accused of using the system to monitor her boyfriend, according to reports.
The Southold incidents are part of a wider pattern: officials and sources say Flock Safety systems have also been targeted in multiple vandalism cases over the past month in California, Connecticut and upstate New York.
Flock, which has quietly become law enforcement’s go-to surveillance tool around the country, has already wired itself into more than 5,000 police agencies nationwide with nearly 90,000 cameras since 2018, according to DeFlock, an activist group tracking the company’s surveillance and expansion.
Southold now has 11 Flock Safety cameras throughout the town. The tech, criticized as “Big Brother”-style mass surveillance systems for the local government, have been installed throughout Greenport, East Marion, Mattituck and Peconic, with the first four Flock cameras deployed in late 2022 while seven more were added last year.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have introduced legislation in an attempt to cap Flock’s reach and strengthen constitutional unreasonable “search and seizure” protections.
State lawmakers are considering a bill that would restrict how government agencies can use and share the license plate data acquired through the cameras.
It would also require the data be deleted within 48 hours of being captured, and mandate annual reports detailing camera locations, searches, matches and any outside access granted.
On the federal level, a slew of bills have been introduced to regulate the tech, including new legislation by Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, that would strip federal funding from any local governments or police departments that deploy the controversial security cameras.
