Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling has ordered the removal of all Flock cameras that are being operated by the sheriff's office.
In a release sent out Friday, Schmaling said the decision came after learning that Flock appears to have been collecting and retaining information "beyond what the Sheriff’s Office understood or agreed to."
Racine County is the latest law enforcement agency to make the decision to end Flock usage. Earlier Friday, all Fond du Lac County law enforcement agencies discontinued using Flock, effective immediately.
On Thursday, Kenosha's police chief said they are terminating the city contract with Flock Safety, citing concerns over data sharing and more.
According to Schmaling, the sheriff's office's agreement with Flock came with the understanding that information collected by its cameras would be subject to a 30-day retention period and used for legitimate public-safety and crime-solving purposes.
"The Sheriff’s Office has since learned that Flock generates a separate data set from information collected by its cameras and markets that dataset to other government and private customers through its 'Traffic Analytics' product," the sheriff's office statement reads. "Flock has confirmed that this aggregated dataset is retained for up to five years, separate from and in addition to the 30-day retention period the Sheriff's Office understood to apply to all information generated by its cameras for public-safety and crime-solving purposes."
“This is not what we agreed to, and it is not what the public was led to believe,” Schmaling said in a statement. “The Sheriff’s Office will not participate in a system that appears to use public safety as a justification for mass surveillance and the collection and monetization of information about innocent people. If Flock used the public-safety purpose of this technology to build a broader commercial data business without the public’s knowledge, that is a serious breach of trust. We will not tolerate it.”
The sheriff's office will explore the use of other automatic license plate reader technology through other vendors, Schmaling said.
“We are not abandoning a technology that can help us protect the public,” Sheriff Schmaling said. “We are abandoning a vendor that appears to have violated the trust placed in it."
