City set to question scope and oversight of new camera tech
The Grand Rapids City Commission will hear from the Grand Rapids Police Department and representatives of Flock Safety during the Public Safety Committee meeting Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., focusing on how the department uses automated license plate readers and related software that can expand law enforcement searches beyond traditional plate reads.
Flock Safety, founded in 2017 and contracted by the GRPD in 2022, provides surveillance hardware and software that city officials say is used to combat crime. The company builds several camera models; the units in active use here are the Falcon devices, which are designed to capture and read license plates.
GRPD currently operates 25 Falcon cameras in the city, according to documents provided in advance of the meeting. While automated license plate readers are not new to Grand Rapids — the department first deployed ALPR technology in 2013 — Flock’s systems offer additional capabilities that have drawn public attention.
"The upcoming committee discussion will cover use, access and transparency around this technology," a City Commission notice said.
What the technology can do
Flock advertises a feature commonly called "vehicle fingerprinting," which identifies a vehicle’s make, model or color and can recognize distinguishing marks such as dents or accessories. That capability allows searches that are not dependent on a license-plate read alone.
GRPD’s contract includes access to FlockOS, the company’s software platform. That interface lets agencies search images and data collected by Flock cameras and, in many cases, query networks shared among multiple jurisdictions.
Scope of searchable data and transparency concerns
Independent compilations of public records from Flock’s network show the potential breadth of searches. The site Have I Been Flocked aggregates records of searches made on Flock’s network by various agencies and reports that single searches across the network have returned very large numbers of devices and networks in other jurisdictions. Using Flock’s transparency tools, GRPD is listed as able to search data from dozens of agencies and nearly two thousand cameras.
The publicly available records also show recent redactions in search logs: the number of devices returned by searches has been redacted in all records since Feb. 2, and operator names were redacted in records dated after Dec. 11, 2025.
Questions for the committee
- How widely GRPD uses the vehicle fingerprinting function and in which neighborhoods or situations.
- What policies govern cross-jurisdiction searches and how often GRPD queries other agencies’ networks.
- What transparency and public-access procedures are in place for records of searches made through FlockOS.
City residents, privacy advocates and civil liberties groups have raised concerns in other municipalities about how long images are retained, how broadly searches can be executed and who may access the data. The upcoming meeting will give local officials a chance to explain the department’s practices and any safeguards in place for Grand Rapids.
| Item | Reported figure |
|---|---|
| GRPD contract year | 2022 |
| Flock founding year | 2017 |
| Falcon (ALPR) cameras in GRPD use | 25 |
| Agencies GRPD can search via Flock transparency | 88 agencies; 1,928 cameras |
Members of the public may attend the committee meeting to listen as GRPD and Flock representatives respond to questions about the technology, its capabilities and oversight. The discussion could inform any future policy changes the Commission considers regarding surveillance equipment and data-sharing agreements.
