On June 22, 2023, 24-year-old Akira Ross stopped at a Circle K off of 620. As she pumps gas, police say a stranger approaches and shoots her dead, less than two miles away from the high school. For two days the suspect was at large, until an arrest was made 230 miles away in Corpus Christi. The Cedar Park Police Department credit ai-powered license plate cameras from Flock Safety with helping track him down.

Flock Safety claims that its technology helps solve 10% of all crimes in the U.S., but privacy advocates warn these cameras come with privacy ramifications. Cedar Park Police Lt. Justin Miller recounts his personal experience in how Cedar Park is utilizing Flock Safety cameras to reduce crime in the city.

“I don’t know what other resources we would have had to be able to identify that suspect had it not been for a license plate reader,” Miller said. “We’ve solved cases everywhere from minor shoplifting all the way to murder cases. It’s not for traffic related offenses. It’s got to be for significant criminal investigations.”

These ai-tools are not just a Cedar Park exclusive. In Georgia, a police chief was arrested for using Flock Cameras to stalk civilians, which is a case privacy groups point to as a warning. 

“It’s a mandatory part of our policy that we do an audit once a quarter, every year without fail,” Miller said. “We audit both our searches and our hot list.” 

Online creator and data analyst Benn Jordan said he is concerned with the technology, citing an incident in which a family was held at gunpoint by police after their car was mistakenly identified as a different stolen vehicle.

“Had this license plate reader error not led to a mother and her young children being held at gunpoint, that family would have never received a $1.9 million settlement from Aurora, Colorado taxpayers,” Jordan said.

When asked about the risk of misidentification, Miller said the CPPD has safeguards in place to prevent false dispatches.

“It’s part of our policy to where our dispatch will receive that alert,” Miller said. “They’ll pull the image up, verify the image matches the alert and then dispatch it out. There have been times where we’ve seen a transposed number, [but] those are very few and far between.”

Jordan said that beyond possible malpractice, bad actors with technical expertise could gain access to unsecured feeds. He recorded off of one of these feeds himself to raise awareness of the issue, but Flock Safety responded by saying those incidents were caused by installer misconfigurations and that security measures have since been strengthened. 

On the local level, Miller maintains that the cameras have played a key role in solving violent crimes.

“Just this month, we’ve been able to solve a shooting that happened at the Target parking lot and a home invasion that occurred this weekend, both using Flock as a resource to solve those cases,” Miller said.

Mia Morneault contributed to this report.