Flock Safety Customers Continue To Act As Government Contractors, Only Without All That Pesky Paperwork

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the surveillance-non-state-(but-also-state!) dept

Flock Safety wants in on the law enforcement surveillance action. It began making inroads by appealing to the next best fascists: homeowners associations. Pitching its ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) to gated communities, Flock promises a crime-free future its pseudo-research can’t back up.

Not that any of that mattered to any of these suburban authoritarians. All they knew is they had cameras capable of surveilling unwanted “intruders,” even if these were just lost drivers, people passing through their “exclusive” neighborhoods on the way to their own less-exclusive neighborhoods, or just kind of “brown.”

Since the rich and the (predominately) white consider law enforcement to be little more than a customer service department, pitching to HOAs meant drawing in cops — the kind of vertical integration all tech companies dream of.

Vertical integration explains a lot of what’s reported here by Thomas Brewster for Forbes. If you’re rich, have a bunch of your own (privately-purchased) cameras, why wouldn’t you just invite cops to shoulder surf your camera feeds? And if they’re your cameras, you can claim it’s a private venture, even if it’s cops doing most of the watching.

Emails obtained via public records requests show Simon Property — the largest mall owner in America — has deputized itself by giving cops always-on access to its parking lot camera feeds.

The emails reveal a previously undisclosed agreement between Simon Property and Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance company backed by Andreessen Horowitz that works with police departments in over 4,000 cities across the country. Simon is a “customer nationwide” and had “recently made the decision to limit access to their individual properties and instead share directly with law enforcement,” according to a July 2023 email between a Flock employee and one of its customers, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

In other words, it appears that Simon is cutting back on providing access to malls’ internal security staff in favor of handing over its video feeds to local cops. The company owns more than 150 shopping centers across 37 states, along with stakes in major retail brands like Forever 21 and J.C. Penney’s.

You’ll notice something in that first sentence. This agreement — while involving law enforcement agencies — was apparently brokered by Flock Safety, a company that has a definite interest in selling more of its ALPRs to more law enforcement agencies.

But the agreement is with Flock. It’s not an agreement with local cops because that would involve oversight, approval from city officials, opportunities for public comment, and all those other things law enforcement agencies consider a waste of time.

Flock is more than happy to perform these intercessions, of course. First off, it wants more private customers. Second, it wants more government customers. Eliminating friction means pleasing both sets of customers simultaneously. And, like many law enforcement agencies, Flock isn’t exactly respectful of applicable laws or whatever few privacy rights might still remain in areas the public can access.

Here’s just one example of this confluence of public and private surveillance from the emails obtained by Forbes:

The emails, obtained by Forbes from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, show that Simon began sharing its Flock feeds from its Fashion Valley mall with the agency in May last year. The Sheriff’s Office didn’t respond to requests for comment asking how it used that access.

The emails also pointed to a collaboration between Flock and the San Diego Police Department (a separate agency from the Sheriff’s), and. SDPD Captain Jeff Jordan told Forbes it too had access to Simon Property feeds. Jordan said it would also get alerted when a car on a criminal suspect hotlist went through one of Simon’s cameras.

Simon declined to comment.

What’s shown here is only the tip of the spy-berg. If this is happening in San Diego, it’s happening elsewhere. Lots of retail outlets are beefing up surveillance in response to increases in shoplifting and other criminal activity. (And they’re doing this even if they’re attempting to obscure their own market failures behind sensationalized reporting on retail theft.) If these outlets are owned by Simon Property, chances are they’re sharing live feeds with cops or are at least being nudged in that direction by the property management firm.

More information of this type is bound to surface as time goes on. And while this is somewhat similar to retail outlets sharing surveillance footage with police investigators when reporting criminal acts, it goes far beyond what your average American retail shopper expects to be happening when they park their car in lot loaded with surveillance cameras. It’s one thing to call in the cops to report criminal acts. It’s quite another to give cops always-on or on-demand access to live footage and recordings. But that’s what Flock wants to facilitate. And it will continue to do so because it allows the company to simultaneously be a private company and a government contractor by proxy, allowing it to make the most money from both sides of the public/private gap without having to be fully accountable to either side.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, alpr, cameras, license plate readers, mall security, pollice, san diego, san diego police department, san diego sheriff's department, sdpd, state action, surveillance, surveillance cameras
Companies: flock, flock safety, simon property