Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced that the city has terminated its partnership with Flock Safety. The decision follows a vendor error identified in the city's 2025 surveillance technology report, which revealed that data from Boston Police Department license plate cameras was shared nationwide without authorization.
The Boston Police Department deployed approximately 45 automated license plate reader cameras during a pilot program running from April to September 2025. Although the contract stipulated that data sharing must be disabled, the vendor enabled a nationwide lookup feature during the first three days of the trial, allowing other law enforcement agencies to access the information.
Following the incident, the city disabled the unauthorized access. Despite the issue, Boston continues to test license plate reader technology, having initiated trials with Motorola in February 2026 and Axon in June 2026. The city mandates that vendors delete recordings after 30 days unless they are required for investigations.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently reported that police nationwide have used Flock systems to conduct searches without legitimate justification, citing instances where officers entered non-serious reasons into the database. While Flock introduced a dropdown menu for search reasons in late 2025, the system does not verify the accuracy of the selected justifications.
