Flock cameras helped Kewanee Police catch juvenile car theft suspects

Six juveniles were arrested in Kewanee last month after they were found with stolen cars from the Peoria area. The juveniles were captured using license plate reading cameras from Flock Safety. Connor Metz, public relations manager at Flock, explained to Our Quad Cities via Zoom how the technology is and isn’t being used.

“We are a public safety company that offers software and hardware solutions to law enforcement to help them more effectively gather objective evidence and work with their community to increase clearance rates and solve crime,” Metz said. “The most impactful and common one is our flagship product, the Falcon License Plate Recognition Camera (LPR). These cameras take still images of passing vehicles and compare the license plate on that vehicle with state and federal databases to see if the vehicle stolen, if it’s associated with a known wanted suspect or associated with something like an Amber Alert or a Silver Alert.”

The cameras use optical character recognition to read the plate information and then sends that data to the cloud where it’s cross referenced across various law enforcement databases. The camera can still accurately read license plates even if they’re in an aftermarket frame or improperly installed.

The company was founded back in 2017 after the now CEO learned the hard way how important accurate license plate numbers are to solving crimes, said Metz. “Our founder and CEO, Garrett Langley, lived in suburban Atlanta and had a rash of burglaries and home break-ins occur in his subdivision. They contacted the authorities and the police said ‘look, we don’t have a license plate of a suspect vehicle. We have a very grainy surveillance image of a vehicle but can’t do anything with that.’ I think a light bulb went off in Garrett’s head and he said, ‘well how about we make one?’ So he teamed up with an old friend that he met in college who was an engineer. They put a smartphone in a weatherproof box at the entrance to the HOA subdivision and that was the start.”

The company has worked with over 5,000 law enforcement partners in 48 states. The product is also available for use in HOAs and subdivisions. The company started working with law enforcement in 2019.

Any data collected from the camera is stored securely and is only accessible to law enforcement. “A lot of people have concerns over surveillance, civil liberties and privacy,” Metz said. “Flock Safety does not own any of this data. We don’t access it; we don’t sell it to third parties in any way. It is all owned by the law enforcement agency the cameras belong to. These are used for crimes; they’re serious crimes – stolen vehicles, missing persons, Amber Alerts, homicides, things like that.”

The data is stored in a very highly encrypted cloud server that uses the same type of encryption that the FBI uses. “We’ve never had a tech breach and we’re very secure in our data, so folks shouldn’t worry about that.” The cameras use cell chips to beam the data up to the cloud. The data on the camera itself is also highly encrypted and doesn’t have public facing IP addresses, making it unhackable. The data is highly encrypted on its way to the cloud and then very highly encrypted in the cloud.

The cameras came to local attention after they were used by Kewanee Police to arrest six juveniles who stole cars from the Peoria area on July 4. “The police department contacts us and says, ‘we’re looking for license plate number ABC123’and then it gets programmed into the system,” Metz explained. “Police departments can set up hot list alerts; they’re looking for a specific vehicle that they want to follow up with on a lead or something like that. Typically what happens is that every stolen car is plugged into what’s called the NCIC, that’s a federal database called the National Crime Information Center. Let’s say your vehicle gets stolen in Illinois. That information is entered into the NCIC. If that vehicle passes by a camera somewhere else, a Flock Safety LPR in Georgia let’s say, that jurisdiction will get an alert. The alerts can go to the 911 Dispatch Center, and they can also be automatically programmed to go to officers’ smartphones or their in-car computer. They get a text message alert saying, ‘hey look, stolen vehicle reported stolen out of Illinois. Here’s what it looks like it when it passed by this camera at this location around this time today. Officers can respond however they see fit from there.”

The results have been nothing short of amazing. “We’ve caught plenty of homicide suspects, child abductor suspects, things like that. The feedback we’ve heard from communities utilizing our technology is favorable across the board, it’s really been incredible.”

“Another really cool part of the LPRs is what we call vehicle fingerprint technology that’s inside them,” said Metz. “Let’s say you’re near a drive by shooting. It’s a very hectic scene, you didn’t get the license plate of the vehicle, but you do remember that it was a blue sedan with a roof rack. Witnesses can tell police officers this and the police can go into the cameras, and they can query back in time. ‘I want to see every blue sedan with a roof rack that was in this area around this time.’ The cameras can display all the blue sedans with a roof rack.” Officers use leads like this to track down suspects.

Data from the cameras is hard deleted after 30 days, so officers can’t go back further than that for searches. The system also creates a list of who has conducted a search. “We created what’s called an auditable search log. If you have an officer searching for a blue sedan with a roof rack, they have to enter in a search the reason why they’re searching as well as the parameters of the search, the date and time and the user who performed the search are all recorded in an auditable log to prevent misuse.” Officers can download still images from the database for use in court hearings.

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