Oneida County sheriff’s officers: Flock cameras are beneficial

A widening national controversy over the use of Flock automated license plate reader cameras has prompted multiple Wisconsin municipalities to abandon the technology amid mounting privacy concerns, but, in Oneida County, where six of the cameras are deployed, sheriff’s department officers say the system has proven to be a valuable tool that saves taxpayer dollars, accelerates criminal investigations and helps locate missing and endangered people.

“It’s good for our community and it helps bring closure in an efficient way,” Oneida County Sheriff’s Office investigative captain Tyler Young told The Lakeland Times. “We’ve had some great successes. Cases can go for years, and to be able to resolve them quickly, it’s a good feeling to be able to go to somebody and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got resolution for you right away.’ That doesn’t come readily in this line of work.”

Young acknowledged that the technology has sparked controversy both nationally and in Wisconsin, but he said local safeguards protect against abuse while enabling deputies to use the system in time-critical situations.

“The stresses of child abductions, the silver alerts, those things that a lot of times can end up tragically,” Young said. “They’re not.”

The debate, though, has grown louder during the past year. While many law enforcement agencies have embraced Flock as an important crime-fighting tool, some civil liberties organizations and citizens have challenged its rapid expansion. A Wisconsin Examiner review last year found that at least 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies used Flock from January 1 to May 31 of 2025.

Critics call it an expansive surveillance network.

“Think of it as facial recognition, but for your vehicle and your daily movements,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) policy analyst Jon McCray Jones wrote last year.

The ACLU points out that data collected through the system may not remain local but can be shared across jurisdictions and, in many instances, is made available to outside agencies, including federal law enforcement authorities.

“For years, this system of massive invasion of privacy expanded with little public awareness or oversight,” Jones wrote. “But that is beginning to change. Communities are finally saying enough is enough and are fighting back.”

That change has become increasingly evident in Wisconsin. Multiple municipalities have ended or decided not to renew contracts with Flock, including Verona, Dane County, Sturgeon Bay, Oshkosh and Fitchburg. In Oshkosh, city officials flip-flopped, voting to approve a Flock contract but then changing its mind a day later, with officials saying the company had lied about the ability to create heat maps of vehicular movement.

In a statement, Flock pushed back.

“Local agencies own and control their data, data sharing is off by default, and data is deleted by default,” the company said in a statement. “We built Flock to support public safety with transparency, accountability and local control.”

The company also says all footage and metadata are deleted on a rolling basis after 30 days, unless otherwise required by law. 

Concerns about misuse have also fueled criticism. Earlier this year, a Milwaukee police officer pleaded guilty to misdemeanor attempted misconduct in public office after using the Flock system to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. The incident prompted the department to tighten internal access controls and reduce the number of officers authorized to use the system.

Privacy advocates say those types of incidents underscore how expanding surveillance technology is open to abuse.

Oneida County: Even more safeguards

Oneida County officers acknowledged those concerns but argue their internal policies and procedures are specifically designed to prevent abuse, creating multiple layers of accountability.

“So how Flock works is we have to have a case number or some type of event that we have to describe what it is,” patrol captain Tim Johnson said. “So something criminal in nature. We add the case number to it for deputies to put a license plate in. They have to get approval from a patrol sergeant to access this. Once that license plate goes in, then they can search within our Flock system where that vehicle might be.”

Supervisor approval is essential, Young said.

“Accountability is checks and balances now,” he said. “It’s not just you knowing, it’s somebody else. … And the case number is created by a third person, which is our communications center. And then the reason code, and that helps us as the management team here when we’re auditing. What’s the reason? Just because you have a case number, what is the reason for this plate to be searched? And it gives us a description.”

When no formal case number exists, such as during an emergency alert or silver alert involving missing vulnerable adults, Young said documenting the justification becomes even more important.

“It might be a silver alert out of Milwaukee, but he has a cabin up in the UP and might be traveling through here,” Young said. “I would encourage deputies to search Oneida County for that. Search for that vehicle, and so we can start tracking people like that down. That would not have a case number, but it’s a mandatory box to do a search. You have to have that reason in there.”

The system also permits investigators to search using characteristics beyond a license plate number.

“It’s vehicle make and model and year,” Young said. “If you can have those, it’s actually better than the license plate.”

Rather than returning thousands of possible matches, he said, the software narrows results dramatically: “You’re not getting 10,000 photographs of vehicles going up Highway 51. You’re getting 10.”

One question raised by privacy advocates concerns whether agencies outside Oneida County can access locally collected information without the knowledge of county officials. Young said they cannot.

“It has to be another law enforcement agency that’s been approved by our administrators at the Oneida County Sheriff’s Office,” he said. “And how it works is, if we’re sharing ours, you’re going to be sharing yours with us. …. So there’s more law enforcement agencies that don’t have access to our cameras than do. Number one, to even get access to our cameras, you have to own cameras and not every law enforcement agency in the country has those and then through our audits we can see who’s used our cameras.”

Within Wisconsin, Young said, use of the technology is treated much like an officer running a conventional license plate inquiry through department computers. The county’s internal policies, however, go beyond what state law expressly requires, and Young says many best practices associated with the system originate with the company itself.

Because the company works with agencies nationwide, Young said it has observed situations where misuse occurred and has adjusted its recommendations accordingly.

“They’re obviously dealing nationally with these cameras,” he said. “They see the hiccups and the misuses that have occurred and they want to limit that as well because they want to keep the business going.”

The department also performs regular audits of system activity. Young says administrators can determine exactly who conducted a search and why, and he said Flock itself periodically reviews agency usage.

“We meet with them at least quarterly,” Young said. “It tends to be more than that just because we have questions and they change things and they want to show us how they’re changing things.”

The company also provides analytical reports identifying primary users and common search patterns.

“They audit us as well and tell us, ‘Hey, this is your usage,’” Young said. “‘These are your primary users. These are your primary searches,’ but those are at our fingertips at all times.’”

If another participating agency uses Oneida County’s cameras, officials say those actions are likewise traceable.

“It’s going to be named,” Young said. “We’re going to know the name of the officer that’s searching it.”

And if misuse were discovered internally?

“Depending on the circumstances, you could be looking at criminal charges,” Young said. “But I don’t think it would be working out very well for anybody’s employment at that point.”

The investigators also stressed that local municipal police departments do not independently access the county’s cameras. Instead, because the sheriff’s office serves as the county’s primary law enforcement agency, deputies conduct searches on behalf of investigations when appropriate.

“If there’s a car theft in the city of Rhinelander or Minocqua, anywhere like that, we serve those people too as the sheriff’s office,” Young said. “We’re going to look for that vehicle.”

For Oneida County officials, the bottom line is that the technology is only as good as the policies governing its use.

“It’s accountability,” Young said. “It’s integrity of the law enforcement.”

Saving time, money … and lives

While the debate over civil liberties and privacy safeguards dominates news cycles, Oneida County officials say practical results rather than constitutional conflict define their experience.

The county initially deployed four cameras and then expanded the network to six. Young says that there are initial install fees and rates that go up over time, but he contends that the annual expense is more than offset by savings elsewhere in the sheriff’s department budget.

“We’re saving in a year thousands of hours of overtime,” Young said. “And that’s an underestimate on that.”

Those savings come largely from reducing the need for deputies to spend countless hours attempting to locate suspect vehicles through traditional investigative methods. 

For investigators working under time pressures, that speed can make a difference. Young and Johnson pointed to homicide investigations, child abductions, Silver Alerts, vehicle thefts and welfare checks as among the cases in which they say the technology has demonstrated its value.

“I look at the homicide that Price County had,” Young said. “We were able to get that gentleman, based on our cameras, because he came into Oneida County and he was in custody pretty quickly.”

He also cited on a previous homicide investigation within Oneida County.

“I go back to the Anderson homicide that we had on Highway 8 a couple years ago,” Young said. “The technology wasn’t there. If we would have had the ability, we would have had them in custody in hours instead of a year.”

The investigators said the system has assisted in a wide range of cases, but they repeatedly returned to emergencies involving missing or endangered people — including a child abduction all the way to New Mexico — as perhaps the strongest justification for the technology.

“The Flock system is the reason why we’re having these successes,” Young said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

By comparison, Young said, obtaining other forms of electronic evidence can take considerably longer.

“There’s other technologies out there that we have to do that take a longer process to get,” he said. “If we want to track somebody’s cell phone or something like that, you have to write warrants and things like that. That takes time, waking up judges and things like that.”

In certain investigations, Young said the time simply is not available.

“And we’re talking about a child abduction,” Young said. “You don’t have the time. I want to get that information as soon as possible.”

Johnson agreed: “We are getting the ending result quickly,” he said.

Young and Johnson say the county’s rurality makes such technology particularly valuable because covering more than 1,100 square miles with a limited number of deputies presents challenges urban departments do not face.

“When you’re looking at Oneida County, how large it is, how rural it is and the major highways that go through here and I have four deputies working — maybe three — how do we cover all these roads?” Young asked.

By placing cameras on major routes, he said, deputies can attend to other investigative duties but still monitor traffic entering or leaving the county. At the same time, he acknowledged that many county and town roads remain uncovered by the cameras.

“I would like to see the technology expand up here,” Young said. “And I’m very aware there’s different thought processes on that.”

The debate has reached the Wisconsin legislature, where lawmakers earlier this year introduced proposals both to limit and fund deployment of the Flock systems.

“There’s people trying to get them disabled and there’s people trying to get grants written for our rural areas to get them,” Young said.

He contrasted Oneida County’s modest network with systems in larger metropolitan areas.

“You go down to Chicago, the Milwaukee area, I mean every on-ramp, off-ramp, you’re going to see these,” Young said. “Toll booths, they’re all over the place.”

Because neighboring agencies have observed successful investigations involving Oneida County’s cameras, he believes interest in expanding the technology continues to grow.

“There’s other entities around us that haven’t had them that will be getting them,” Young said. “Part of that I think is because they got success off our cameras.”

Constitutional questions in court

Meanwhile, as Wisconsin communities debate the positive and negative aspects of Flock technology, a separate legal battle unfolding in federal court has become one of the nation’s leading tests of automated license plate reader systems.

The Institute for Justice filed the lawsuit, Schmidt et al. v. City of Norfolk et al., on behalf of Norfolk, Virginia, residents Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington, who argued that the city’s network of 176 Flock cameras amounts to unconstitutional mass surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Norfolk officials sought to create what police chief Mark Talbot described as a nice curtain of technology that would make it difficult for motorists to travel significant distances without being photographed by a camera, the complaint asserts.

The plaintiffs contended that the system records the movements of ordinary citizens without individualized suspicion, and store images and other data that could later be searched by law enforcement officers without first obtaining a warrant.

Modern Flock technology, the plaintiffs argued, goes beyond traditional license plate readers because it captures every passing vehicle, retains information for weeks and uses artificial intelligence to identify vehicles based not only on license plates but also on characteristics such as make, model and other unique features. 

The Institute for Justice argues that such capabilities enable authorities to reconstruct a person’s movements, associations, and travel patterns in ways that raise serious constitutional concerns.

Flock has vigorously disputed those claims. The company maintains that license plates are displayed publicly and that courts across the country have repeatedly held there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in information visible to anyone traveling on a public roadway.

In January a federal judge rejected the constitutional challenge brought by Schmidt and Arrington, concluding that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that the Norfolk system constituted an unreasonable search under existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.

Federal district judge Mark Davis concluded that Norfolk’s system of 176 cameras had many thousands more blind spots than it had unblinking eyes.

“Critically, unlike the revealing inferences that can be drawn from knowing precisely where, or even roughly where, a vehicle starts a trip, drives, parks, lingers, or overnights anywhere across the entire city, defendants’ system only identifies a vehicle’s location when it enters one of 75 areas,” Davis wrote in his decision. “After the system identifies a car, it quickly loses the trail, and thus does not ‘follow’ or ‘surveil’ that same car unless it happens past another fixed ALPR camera. This could happen seconds later as the car turns right at an intersection with a four-camera cluster, or it could occur hours or even days later when the car next passes an ALPR camera several miles away.”

The bottom line was, the judge wrote, it was not a system designed for surveilling people.

“Defendants’ fixed ALPR cameras, like security cameras, are best described as captur[ing] images of locations, not individuals,” he wrote.

The judge rejected the contention that the cameras violated an objective expectation of privacy.

“To the contrary, the more police work necessary to fill in the gaps to build a path of travel (such as monitoring a suspect’s residence, tailing a person, interviewing citizens or accessing citizen-provided doorbell camera footage, or placing a pole camera near a place of business), the less the rudimentary ‘tracking’ technology under review can be said to be ‘capturing’ or creating a record of all, or virtually all, of a person’s movements.”

What’s more, the judge continued, the limited number of photographs available on a 21-day rolling basis from 75 camera track clusters in Norfolk does not capture the whole of a person’s intimate movements or a window into where citizens drive, park, visit, linger, sleep, or patronize.

The decision represented a significant victory for Flock and for law enforcement agencies using automated license plate readers, although privacy advocates have continued pressing similar arguments in courts and legislatures around the country, and the plaintiffs in this case have filed an appeal.

For Oneida County officials, however, the legal debate remains secondary to what they view as measurable public safety benefits.

“It’s a great tool,” Young said. “It brings resolution. It’s an investment that we’ve made and we have had great success with it.”

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.