As members of the Riverside community have begun speaking out against the use of Flock license plate reader cameras in town, Riverside officials said the village has changed the way it shares collected data and asks its police staff to use the technology.
Resident Brian Lester, an opponent of Flock, put together a 12-page so-called rebuttal letter in September responding to statements made by Public Safety Director Matthew Buckley that the Landmark published in its first Flock story at the start of September. In an eight-page response, the village announced the changes to its Flock policy.
Full versions of each document are available at the end of the story. They could not be included in print due to their length.
“Law enforcement agencies outside Illinois previously had access to Riverside’s cameras through data-sharing permissions. Riverside has since revoked that access,” the village said in its statement, which Village President Doug Pollock shared with the Landmark.
In addition, every search of Flock data by a Riverside police officer must now include the number of an existing police report and an explanation of the search’s law enforcement purpose.
While the village asserted that searches without report numbers did not necessarily constitute“improper” searches, it said the new “requirement strengthens transparency and accountability by connecting each search to an identifiable case and documenting why the information was needed.”
At the village board’s Oct. 1 meeting, Pollock said the board is set to discuss Riverside’s contract with Flock at its next meeting on Thursday, Oct. 15.
In a statement provided to the Landmark, Trustee Cristin Evans said she believes Riverside should cancel its contract with Flock and revoke other agencies’ access to the village’s data.
“I have no doubt that the Riverside Police Department uses Flock technology with a sincere commitment to public safety,” Evans wrote. “Recent state and national reports on Flock use show a widespread pattern of unauthorized searches, public concealment, and improper use of data-sharing networks to bypass local privacy protections. The village’s current safeguards are insufficient to protect resident and visitor data from misuse.”
In his rebuttal letter, Lester used Flock data he had accessed from the police department through a public records request to push back on assertions he thought the data contradicted. Lester said the “biggest claim” was that, as Buckley said in September, “Any search within our system is audited by the command staff here at the police department.”
“That implies that these are the kind of searches that they’re OK with the system having,” Lester told the Landmark in an interview. “Your claim is that these are all audited, and the fact is, they very clearly can’t be because 153,600 searches were done during the month [of August 2026] of our data. That [number of searches] cannot be audited by our police staff every month.”
In the village’s response, it said each search of Flock data creates an audit record, “but the existence of a record is not the same as command staff reviewing every search individually. Riverside command staff review searches made by Riverside personnel.”
Lester pointed to searches made with the stated reason of “LMAO” — an initialism that stands for “laughing my ass off” — made by the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff’s Office in addition to searches with no reason given.
The village in its response called the searches “inappropriate” and disavowed them as providing “no meaningful explanation of a law enforcement purpose.” Being outside Indiana, Riverside no longer shares its Flock data with the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.
Lester said six of the agencies Riverside had shared its data with have direct 287(g) agreements with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, so while Riverside does not share data directly with ICE in accordance with the Illinois TRUST Act, other agencies could access its Flock data on behalf of the federal agency. Four of the agencies were in Tennessee while one was in Wisconsin and one was in Alabama.
While Riverside no longer shares its data with those agencies, the village said agencies outside Illinois were required to acknowledge the state’s restriction on the use of data for immigration enforcement, “establish[ing] a clear obligation” for those agencies not to share the data with ICE. That acknowledgment “must be supported by access controls and review of actual search activity,” the village said.
At the village board level
On Oct. 1, three residents gave public comment about Riverside’s use of Flock cameras. Among them were Lester as well as advocate Mike Dobbins and opponent Mark Shevitz, who was a village trustee from 2009 to 2013.
In his comment, Lester reiterated many of the points in his rebuttal letter, including the village’s inability to directly audit every search of its Flock data due to the sheer number.
“Our internal guardrails, they’re not enough. Flock security is not enough,” he said. “The only way to stop people from abusing this kind of Flock data is to just not collect it.”
Shevitz, who also spoke to the Landmark last month to describe his concerns around Flock, asked the village board not to renew Riverside’s contract with Flock due to a lack of data showing a reduction in crime since the license plate readers were installed.
Dobbins, who was in favor of the continued use of Flock cameras, argued the privacy lost through Flock’s tracking of movement was worthwhile for the benefits they brought to the village’s police department and overall security.
“Riverside is a low crime, low lawsuit community precisely because we have proactive, upstanding law enforcement officers who use modern policing technology while respecting the rights of citizens,” Dobbins said.
The village board is set to discuss Flock on Oct. 15, though there may be some disagreement among its members on what the future of Flock should look like in Riverside, with Evans calling for the contract’s cancellation.
In a September interview with the Landmark, Pollock said he had kept up with the national concerns around Flock, including the abuse of its data in cases where police staff allegedly stalked people, but that he didn’t foresee such a problem in Riverside.
“Most of everything I’ve heard in the national news about Flock is people misusing the technology. That leads me to think we need to make sure our controls are there,” Pollock said. “[Riverside staff] are doing everything they can to make sure we’re using the technology right, that there aren’t any abuses internally.”
