The Arlington County Board voted Tuesday to shut down its fleet of Flock license plate-reading cameras and expunge most of the collected data, bowing to residents’ privacy concerns.
The county had 26 license plate readers and 15 Condor cameras that could pan, tilt and zoom, allowing more particularized surveillance of specific vehicles or persons.
Board Chair Matt de Ferranti said the five-member board is heeding residents’ demands.
“While Arlington has maintained strong safeguards to prevent the abuse of this technology throughout its use by the County, and there has been no report of misuse to date, the County Board takes seriously our obligation to maintain our community’s trust,” Mr. de Ferranti, a Democrat, said in a statement.
The decision only applies to the county’s cameras; those maintained by private owners aren’t affected.
The board wants the cameras removed within 14 business days, though logistical delays may occur.
The board said all data “not required for active criminal investigation” will be deleted “in accordance with applicable contractual, legal and operational requirements.”
Flock Safety is the big player in what had been a growing market of public-private surveillance. The license plate readers log every vehicle that passes by, giving an unprecedented look at the travels of individual vehicles.
The data can be searched by “authorized users” in the communities that contract with Flock.
Arlington’s decision is part of a growing national backlash against the cameras, with communities rushing to cancel even as some law enforcement officials mount a defense.
FBI Director Kash Patel told Congress on Tuesday that the cameras help rescue kidnapped children from sexual predators and track down suspects.
“We have saved children over and over again from these child predators, we’ve retrieved these victims, we’ve also prosecuted these kidnappers,” Mr. Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He said Flock cameras helped identify the man who carried out a mass shooting at Brown University last year. The university’s own surveillance cameras weren’t helpful, but a Flock camera produced a license plate number that helped investigators track down the suspect, who killed himself as authorities closed in.
Still, resistance has soared, with vandals breaking or covering over the cameras.
A group of hackers in Florida grabbed a camera off a roadway and copied the data inside it. Some data was still encrypted, but the camera’s logs showed it captured more than a million images over three weeks, identifying more than 50,000 vehicles, according to reporting by Wired and 404 Media.
The news outlets said the camera also, in some cases, could detect people — such as motorcycle riders. In one image, the camera zoomed in on a motorcycle’s saddlebag patch.
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