For the past two and a half years, Riverside’s police department has made use of Flock cameras, the license plate readers that have been embroiled in national controversy due to reports of misuse and concerns over unwarranted surveillance.
Officials maintain that the technology bolsters police’s ability to track criminals and solve crimes, but some residents say they think the cameras represent an encroachment on their right to privacy.
In an interview with the Landmark, Village President Doug Pollock said he has kept up with the controversy surrounding Flock, but he attributed many of the issues to abuse of the data by individuals, as in cases where police officers in other jurisdictions have been accused of using Flock data to stalk people.
“It’s all about having internal guardrails and controls. Most of everything I’ve heard in the national news about Flock is people misusing the technology,” Pollock said.
“[Public Safety Director] Matt [Buckley] and [Village Manager] Jessica [Frances] will nod their heads: Every time I see something in the national news or local or state news, I bring it to their attention,” he said. “I say, ‘How does this affect Riverside?” They’ve been able to say, ‘Doug, here’s what we’ve got to control to make sure that doesn’t happen here,’ and I’ve been very satisfied with their responses.”
With the approval of the village’s 2027 budget by the end of the year looming in the distance, Pollock said Riverside’s attorney is looking into the changes to Flock’s standard terms and conditions the company made earlier this year.
“So far, I’ve not seen anything that would lead me to believe that Flock can take our data and use it without our permission or knowledge, but we’re still reviewing that,” he said. “I don’t think those new terms and conditions, from what we can tell so far, affect Riverside, our contract and our ability to control our data.”
The ACLU said the new terms and conditions could allow Flock to sell and control data collected from municipalities, including a perpetual right for Flock to use that data to “support and improve” its services even after a customer terminates its contract.
Pollock said Riverside’s contract with Flock specifies that the company shall not sell the village’s data.
Residents’ concerns
Riverside resident Mark Shevitz said he was “surprised” when he learned Riverside had Flock cameras. Shevitz wrote a Letter to the Editor on the topic that the Landmark published last week. He was a village trustee from 2009 to 2013.
“Riverside is a low-crime community. Obviously, our public safety teams do a great job to help keep us safe, so it was perplexing to me to find out that we had a couple of cameras in town,” Shevitz told the Landmark in an interview.
After learning about Riverside’s use of Flock, Shevitz said he looked deeper into how the technology operates.
“What concerns me most is the basic model. In my mind, it’s collect first, investigate later,” he said. “Information is collected about people who aren’t suspected of anything so it can be searched later if it becomes useful, and I don’t think that should be the default relationship between citizens and government in a free society. To me, that’s backwards.”
Critics of Flock beyond Riverside’s borders have espoused similar concerns. DeFlock, an organization aimed at raising awareness of the “threats [Flock] poses to personal privacy and civil liberties,” described the database created by the network of cameras as “dragnet surveillance” designed to coordinate police resources targeted in large part at civilians who are not suspected of a crime.
DeFlock pointed to a 2021 study by the Independent Institute that found that license plate readers “endanger the civil rights of innocent citizens” while failing to deter crimes like theft or give police an edge in investigative cases based on 16 years of data on stolen vehicles in Piedmont, California. The report found that less than 0.3% of license plate reader hits turn into useful leads for investigations, according to DeFlock.
Brian Lester is another Riverside resident who said the village’s use of Flock has raised eyebrows. With 10 years of experience in computer science and machine learning research, he professed “a decent understand[ing] of how Flock [could be] implemented.”
Lester said he began researching Flock once he noticed the license plate readers in Riverside, leading him to request Flock data from the Riverside police department through the Freedom of Information Act. Lester, too, described Flock’s databases as dragnet systems designed to track civilians’ movements over long distances.
“One of the things that Flock loves to hide behind on why this is OK is, ‘Your car is being tracked. You’re not being tracked. We’re not sure if it’s you in the car.’ They love to use that as their defense, but that’s never going to be something that stops you from getting pulled over when Flock misidentifies your car,” Lester said.
He said the collection of data could be used to construct patterns on where people could be or would allow police to profile people based on their movements, like if they’re a frequent visitor to a gun range or a dispensary.
“The only way to keep this data really safe is to not collect this data,” Lester said.
He made reference to the 2025 case of a Texas sheriff’s office searching Mount Prospect Flock data to track down a woman who had obtained an abortion and fled Texas, but not to Illinois.
“[State officials] were talking about, ‘We are putting all these safeguards into the data so that people who go against our values can’t access it.’ It’s like, they’re always going to find a way to access it. The only way to have kept this woman safe is to not have written down that she came here,” Lester said. “I don’t think there’s a safe or constitutional way to have this kind of stuff. I think, very clearly, the costs outweigh the gains.”
