Nantucket To Take Down Flock Cameras

Nantucket’s Flock cameras are coming down.

The Select Board voted unanimously on Wednesday to stop the use of the controversial automatic license plate readers at the corner of Easy Street and Broad Street, joining a growing wave of towns across the state and the country that have ended contracts with the surveillance company.

However, the Select Board left the door open for the police department to come back with an “alternative technology” to replace the cameras.

While the Nantucket police department has continued to maintain that the cameras are a useful law enforcement tool and has provided examples in which information collected from the cameras helped to solve crimes on the island, an outpouring of public opposition and the same privacy concerns that have been lodged against Flock nationwide led the Select Board to instruct the department to end its contract with the embattled company and remove the cameras.

Critics claim that the cameras function as mass surveillance, recording huge amounts of information about every car that passes by. This data is then vulnerable to exploitation by police officers, who have used Flock cameras as personal stalking tools in many high-profile off-island cases. It is also vulnerable to cyberattacks. The police department has so far declined to share any details about the effectiveness of its cybersecurity measures in response to community concerns and questions from the Current.

Chief of Police Jody Kasper continued to defend the use of the cameras during Wednesday's Select Board meeting. She will, however, have the chance to convince the public about alternative technologies, as the Select Board required that any replacement surveillance tool the department identifies to replace the Flock cameras would have to go through a public feedback process.

The town initially purchased the Flock cameras at the administrative level without going before the Select Board, and installed them in 2021, though the exact installation date is unclear. The town has said the cameras were installed in September of 2021, but photos obtained by the Current show the cameras in place at least a month earlier.

Over the last several months, dozens of cities and counties across the country, including 25 municipalities in Massachusetts, have rolled back automatic license plate reader programs under pressure from local residents. Massachusetts is also considering restrictions at the state level.