HOAs are private entities and therefore are not subject to public records requests or regulation.
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Over 200 HOAs nationwide have bought and installed Flock’s license plate readers, according to an Intercept investigation, the most comprehensive count to date. HOAs have large budgets - they collect over $100 billion a year from homeowners - and it’s an opportunity for law enforcement to gain access into gated, private areas, normally out of their reach. There are key strategic reasons that make homeowners associations the ideal customer. It’s a deliberate marketing strategy.įlock Safety, which began as a startup in 2017 in Atlanta and is now valued at approximately $3.5 billion, has targeted homeowners associations, or HOAs, in partnership with police departments, to become one of the largest surveillance vendors in the nation. In a statement, Flock Safety brushed off the Lake County incident as an “an honest misunderstanding,” but the increasing surveillance of community members’ movements across the country is no accident.
In Lake County, Florida, nearly 100 cameras went up “overnight like mushrooms,” according to one county commissioner - without a single permit. Neighbors in Atlanta, Georgia, remained in the dark for a year after cameras were put up. Lakeway is just one example of a community that has faced Flock’s surveillance without many homeowners’ knowledge or approval. “We didn’t go out there thinking we were being Big Brother.” “We thought we were just being a partner with the city,” Bill Hayes, the chief operating officer of Legend Communities, which oversees the Rough Hollow Homeowners Association, said at the meeting. By the time of the June city council meeting, the surveillance system had notified the police department over a dozen times. Instead, the Rough Hollow Homeowners Association, a nongovernment entity, and the Lakeway police chief had signed off on the deal in January 2021, giving police access to residents’ footage.
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The deal to install the cameras had not been approved by the city government’s executive branch.
“We find ourselves with a surveillance system,” he said, “with no information and no policies, procedures, or protections.” Kilgore himself had just recently learned of the cameras. Despite being in place for six months, no one had told residents that they were being watched. Kilgore was referring to a system consisting of eight license plate readers, installed by the private company Flock Safety, that was tracking cars on both private and public roads. “I believe it is my duty to inform you that a surveillance system has been installed in the city of Lakeway,” he told the perplexed crowd. The number vehicles being flagged were coming in so fast it was impossible to keep up with pulling them over, Schmidt said.At a city council meeting in June 2021, Mayor Thomas Kilgore, of Lakeway, Texas, made an announcement that confused his community.
He said the system identified one suspended driver, four unlicenced drivers, and 27 expired vehicle registrations. Schmidt said the technology will be a "game changer" for police, who can now scan hundreds of licence plates within minutes while monitoring the roadways.įor example, within 22 minutes of patrolling Highway 403 in Mississauga on Monday, Schmidt said the system was able to flag 32 vehicles for infractions. One or two cameras point forward, and one points backwards, so that an officer can scan cars in multiple directions. Up to three cameras are mounted on top of police cruisers. It also has the capability of capturing vehicles of interest during amber alerts. Schmidt said the ALPR technology instantly notifies police of things like expired registration, arrest warrants, or if a vehicle is stolen. “Now, it’s being rolled out to every car across the province.” “We have been using it for several years in a limited capacity,” Schmidt said in an interview. Kerry Schmidt told CTV News Toronto the Automatic Licence Plate Reader (ALPR) system expansion began on Monday in the Greater Toronto Area, and will continue to rollout further across Ontario in the coming weeks.
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The Ontario Provincial Police will easily be able to catch drivers for even minor infractions with the major expansion of licence plate scanning technology in the province.
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