Monroe County cancels Flock Safety camera contract early
Commissioners in Monroe County – home to the city of Bloomington and Indiana University’s main campus – voted last week to sever ties with the license-plate scanning company Flock Safety a year before it was set to expire.
The county will have to pay Flock Safety about $3,000 to remove the six cameras currently being used by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
“ I think it is $3,000 well spent,” commissioner Jody Madeira said before the vote. “I appreciate the advocacy of the citizens who spoke before the city on this issue, and I think that it would be worth paying that $3,000 as a county.”
Commissioner Julie Thomas said the technology has helped to reduce crime but she still voted to end the contract, citing privacy concerns.
“It has helped them find people who are missing. It has helped them track people coming into the county to do nefarious things,” she said. “It has a role. But the way the data has been abused—and we’ve seen national stories about this—is terrible.”
Thomas said she would notify the company of the decision right away.
Thomas also said that she consulted Sheriff Ruben Marté before the vote and that he did not object to cancelling the contract. A sheriff’s office spokesperson did not immediately respond to messages over the weekend.
In April, the City of Bloomington announced it would not renew its contract with Flock Safety after protests from privacy and civil rights advocates.
Responding to that decision, sheriff’s office spokesperson Jeff Brown defended the cameras, saying they had helped solve serious crimes.
“It could be a missing person, a missing juvenile, an endangered adult,” Brown said in an interview in April. “We have our detectives using it for more serious crimes, murders, or robberies, burglaries.”
A mapping site called FlockHopper that tracks Flock and other license-reading cameras shows more than 120,000 camera locations across the country. The map shows more than 2,300 cameras in Indiana.
Stephanie Wiechmann contributed to this story.
