Small solar panels with compact black cameras have quietly cropped up along roads and cities all over New York, and people are starting to ask hard questions about who is watching them and why?

Municipalities throughout the state have contracts with a private surveillance company called Flock Safety, whose automated license plate readers or ALPRs form a connected video network of camera feeds for anyone with credentialed access to their services.

The company claims they help create safer communities, and some law enforcement agencies swear by the gear for criminal cases involving a heinous range of theft and violence. But a roar of concern from all sides of the political spectrum has grown nationwide with questions about civil liberties, privacy and the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. This comes at a time when crime across New York state has been trending downward since 2023.

Indiscriminate surveillance

Every car passing an ALRP camera is scanned in detail and identifiable by registration, make, model, paint color, roof racks or even bumper stickers. The software crunches those details into a searchable database and pings local users when a parameter matches an active hot list.

Contractors can mount camera units on almost any utility pole in a matter of hours without laying an inch of cable since the units are powered by tiny solar arrays, and broadcast data through standard cellular signals. Most people would never notice their presence unless someone pointed them out.

Organizations like the New York Civil Liberties Union see this steady buildout as a slow-motion unraveling of basic Fourth Amendment rights. Another group called DeFlock hosts an interactive real-time map of active Flock Safety ALPR cameras nationwide at deflock.org.

These cameras do not have a heavy presence in Sullivan County compared to their use in large metropolitan areas like New York City, Syracuse, Albany, Binghamton and Buffalo. But Manor Ink, on consulting the DeFlock map, was able to confirm that the cameras are in the county, with the highest concentration in Liberty.

Limiting data sharing

Liberty Police Chief Steven D’Agata told the Ink his department has ten Flock Safety cameras, seven of which are the modern, all-black ALRP networked units, and credits them as an invaluable asset in assisting with a number of criminal arrests since entering village service in October 2025.

Though most departments across the country opt-in for the Flock Safety national network tier, Chief D’Agata said he intentionally decided to limit the department’s data sharing to the statewide level, and the department’s hardware lease was fully funded by the New York State Law Enforcement Tech grant.

The Liberty PD has additionally implemented other guardrails on their use of this ALPR tech with the public’s privacy concerns in mind. The department requires mandatory training for network access, a 30-day data retention setting that automatically deletes old footage, and an internal audit process that randomly selects ten percent of their monthly inquiries for ethics review.

“I am aware of some of the privacy and constitutional concerns surrounding them and as a result of that, we’ve done a few very specific things with our program to mitigate some of the risks they potentially are associated with,” Chief D’Agata explained. “Because, while I’ll acknowledge that it is an incredibly effective crime-fighting tool, I will 100-percent acknowledge that there is the possibility that it could be misused, as could any police technology or any debt-sensitive database, and I also acknowledge the concerns that people would have regarding their privacy and their Fourth Amendment rights.”

Monticello Police Chief David Lindsay said that his department has no intention of implementing Flock Safety cameras, while the Sullivan County Sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for a comment before presstime.

Objections to ALPR use

Flock Safety cameras dominate the current conversation, but competitors like Motorola’s Vigilant, Axon and Rekor sell nearly identical cloud setups with their own shared database networks.

ALPRs do not discriminate between a perpetrator fleeing a crime scene and a parent picking up groceries; they log everybody. Put enough ALPR images together, and an investigator could conceivably piece together where someone sleeps, where they pray, which doctor they visit or what political rallies they attend. The Washington Post reports that at least 50 law enforcement officers across the country have been accused of or even arrested for misusing this technology.

Organizations opposed to ALPRs say their use amounts to continuous, warrantless location tracking on an unprecedented scale. Whether communities decide to unplug the readers, rein them in with local laws or accept them as a modern reality, the debate over who controls public space has spilled out into the open.

Reaction to ALPRs

Currently, New York has no limits on who can access data collected by automated license plate readers, how it can be stored and shared, or how long it can be kept. NY State Senator Michelle Hinchey (D, District 41) has authored a bill that would put clear guardrails on ALPR use to protect New Yorkers’ privacy while allowing law enforcement to use the tool for legitimate public safety work.

Incidents of ALPR misuse have been cited on the American Civil Liberties Union website, aclu.org: “ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock to go after immigrants without warrants. Kansas police used them to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while ... a mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen.”

Reaction to the cameras has sometimes been destructive. In New York, Flock Safety cameras have been vandalized on Long Island, in the city of Troy and in Erie County. Hundreds of incidents of camera vandalism have also been reported in recent weeks around the country.