Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen says he is firing Flock Safety after losing trust in the license plate reader company.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen says he is firing Flock Safety after losing trust in the license plate reader company.
Allen spoke after traveling to Atlanta late last week for the Flock Forward Public Safety Conference, where Flock Safety is headquartered.
Allen said he reached a breaking point with the company after growing concerns about its practices and after problems involving Flock elsewhere around the country.
Ryan Laughlin: “So what did Flock do to make you lose trust in them?”
“From what I was told last week – when I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to probably and get rid of you guys or I might mix you guys with other vendors.’ I was doing that on purpose to get their response,” Allen said. “There response I didn’t like. And the response was, ‘Well, if you do that, you’re going to lose access to the system unless you have this many cameras,’ and so on, and so on. That’s not a good business practice. Two – most importantly that’s not in the contract. Three, that showed me that people are panicking.”
Why Allen changed course
4 Investigates reported last year that it gained backdoor access to Allen’s investigations through Flock. A state law passed last year later closed that backdoor.
Allen said those issues, along with other red flags and national problems tied to Flock, led him to end the relationship with the company.
“Some will say that we don’t want this system at all. I don’t think that’s the way we should go, some others are like we just need to catch criminals. I don’t think there’s a side,” Allen said. “This is something that you have to be in the middle about. It’s constitutional rights and it’s crime. We have to get it right.”
Allen also said he had already cut off access to sharing Flock data with Torrance and Curry counties because he had concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessing their data.
Allen said he is going to look for another automated license plate vendor, but plans to call a Bernalillo County town hall meeting before deciding what comes next.
Tune in to KOB 4 tonight at 10 for the full story.
