Officials say Flock Safety cameras asset for local law enforcement despite national concerns

When a group of criminals on a multistate theft spree stopped at the Jasper Ulta, swiped testers from the displays, and bolted out the door, a witness was able to describe the vehicle to a responding Jasper Police Officer.

That officer passed the information along to Jasper Detective Sgt. Greg Brescher, who entered the description into the Flock Safety database. He found that one of the 22 cameras deployed throughout Dubois County had captured an image of the vehicle, including the license plate number.

From this, Brescher was also able to determine where the suspects were heading.

“We actually tracked them down on their way to Evansville, and we notified Evansville PD and Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Department,” Brescher explained. “Vanderburgh County found them on the interstate, pulled them over, and detained them for us until we brought them back to Jasper.”

The criminal activity had begun in Florida with multiple Ulta stores being hit across several states as they traveled to Indiana.

“Hillsborough County, Florida knew who they were,” Brescher said.

The group was suspected of at least $50,000 in retail theft in the Florida county.

“We know of at least three other cities that are investigating this same group of three people,” Brescher added.

Using the Flock Safety cameras, Jasper Police stopped the crime spree about 45 minutes after they hit the Ulta. According to Brescher, the cameras seemingly allowed them to track the trio in real time.

The cameras have been used extensively by all the local departments.

In Ferdinand, the Flock Safety cameras there have helped locate and apprehend an individual suspected of a murder in Texas, solve a hit-and-run of a local business, and capture the individuals involved in a snatch-and-grab at the Tri-County YMCA among many others.

Local narcotics investigators also use them to track suspected drug trafficking in the area.

Huntingburg officers have solved stolen car cases using them.

The cameras aren’t just solving crimes, either. According to Jasper Police Chief Chad Dick, in a recent incident, the department was notified of an individual with the early onset of dementia who had gone missing.

“[The spouse] gave us the plate number and through the statewide Flock system, we were able to find [the person] in Jeffersonville,” he explained. “It gave us an idea of where [the individual] was.”

With the information they had, they alerted local authorities, and the individual was later found in Kentucky.

Dick, a retired Indiana State Trooper, also recalled the system being used to locate a missing woman right before he retired. “There was a case where a lady was traveling, and her family was worried about her,” he explained.

She hadn’t checked in nor arrived at her destination in the expected timeframe.

With the cameras on Interstate 64, troopers determined she had passed a certain mile marker but had not been seen farther along the interstate.

“That narrowed down the search area real quick,” Dick said.

Troopers located her along the identified stretch of the interstate in a wooded area where her vehicle had run off the road. The cameras reduced the amount of time it would have taken troopers to search the 140-mile stretch of I-64 through Indiana.

Dubois County Prosecuting Attorney Beth Schroeder said the cameras also help develop suspects in cases with individuals originating outside the county. When several catalytic converters were stolen from vehicles in the area, investigators checked vehicles entering the county around the time of the thefts, isolating patterns to identify likely suspects.

The system also flags people with serious outstanding warrants the moment they cross into the county in a vehicle registered to them.

“We’ve had several people come into Dubois County — most of the time off the interstate in Ferdinand — and they have murder warrants or other very serious charges pending or warrants outstanding,” Schroeder said. “We’ve apprehended several violent people.”

That is just a sample of the hundreds of cases local police say they’ve solved with the cameras since implementing them in the county. According to Ferdinand Chief Rob Randle, they have become an invaluable tool that assists officers in meeting the needs of the community quickly and efficiently.

Dubois County’s law enforcement agencies jointly implemented the camera system in 2022-2023. Currently, 22 cameras are in operation through contracts with Flock Safety, one of the largest vendors of the systems in the country.

Ferdinand has two cameras; Huntingburg and Jasper each have four within their jurisdictions; the sheriff’s office has six in the county, and the prosecuting attorney’s office also pays for six that our located in the county. Each camera costs $2,500 annually in the current five-year contract with Flock Safety.

According to Schroeder, the departments met and determined how many cameras they would like in the county, with each assuming responsibility for its jurisdiction. Her office, then led by current Dubois County Superior Court Judge Anthony Quinn, contributed to the project by agreeing to pay for six of the cameras.

Most of the cameras are aligned to capture images of vehicles as they enter the county or our communities along the major thoroughfares. They face into the county — a deliberate choice that has been beneficial for local law enforcement.

“The reason they (cameras) are facing the way they are facing is because we want to know what’s coming into our community,” Huntingburg Chief Brad Kramer said.

“When a bad guy comes here, it tells us a bad guy’s here and we go look for them,” Brescher added. “It is almost instant when someone entering the county is flagged.”

That’s not always conducive for investigations though. Brescher said he wished there were more facing outbound because a lot of the crimes that he investigates occur here and then those criminals leave. “But the majority of the cameras we have in Dubois County are all recording incoming traffic,” he affirmed.

Despite what the internet may tell you about these cameras, the ones used by Dubois County agencies only capture images of passing vehicles and then record the license plate number, make, model and a description of the vehicle. And the weather, lighting, and other factors can impact the system properly recording the information.

Police want the public to understand that is all the system captures.

“The biggest misconception is that people think they have facial recognition,” Kramer said. “It doesn’t do that. I don’t know how people got that information, but there’s nowhere in the system for biometrics or facial recognition.”

The motion-activated cameras simply capture images of passing vehicles. According to Kramer, they aren’t activated by pedestrians or bicyclists, but they do pick up motorcycles because they can detect the license plates.

Once recorded, those images can be searched by an officer or investigator who is required to log onto the system with their credentials and provide a reason for the search, whether through a case number or, if they have administrative privileges, with a reason for the search like as part of a preliminary investigation or missing person.

Each department is responsible for auditing their own search records. No department spoken to for this story has a standard procedure for oversight but all reported they regularly check out what searches are being conducted on Flock Cameras.

The ACLU has argued that these cameras record too much information and can show patterns of behavior from motorists. However, there is no Constitutional limit on someone being photographed or recorded driving on a public roadway. There are social media dash camera pages dedicated to sharing other drivers’ misteps.

“I think from a practical perspective, if somebody wanted to follow you around in their car, they could,” Schroeder said.

Chief Dick pointed to cellphones as having tremendously more information sharing capacity, including location data, than any of the cameras operating in Dubois County.

And Flock Safety has a default contractual timelimit of 30 days for keeping the data on file, though that time can be adjusted through the contracts the company has with individual jurisdictions. All the departments in Dubois County are on the 30-day default. In fact, Det. Brescher has ran into that 30-day wall for investigations he’s conducted.

“We can’t even get the data (past 30 days) with a warrant,” he explained. “There have been times when that 30-day window has passed and I’ve contacted Flock telling them I really need to know if a certain vehicle was in our town. They’re like ‘We ain’t got it.'”

It is important to note that as of Aug. 13, the 30-day default retention timeline was reduced. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley announced the company is cutting its default recommended retention period from 30 days to seven days, citing internal data showing more than 90 percent of searches are completed within a week. During his announcement, he stated currently contracted agencies that switch to the seven-day window will get free access to a new “Evidence Mode,” which lets detectives preserve specific automatic license plate reader data in storage for investigations that run longer.

Flock said existing customers — which would include Dubois County’s agencies — can keep their current, “democratically approved” retention periods.

The company also announced several other changes rolling out this year, including mandatory multi-factor authentication, a required “Audit Assistance” anomaly-detection feature for all law enforcement customers by the end of 2026, and mandatory case codes for searches — with exceptions logged for administrator review in emergencies.

Locally, the response to that announcement is still developing. But for officers like Det. Brescher, the case for the technology itself hasn’t changed.

“As far as the law enforcement side of it, they are invaluable piece of equipment,” Brescher said. “They 100 percent keep this community, this county, safer. What those cameras can do, it would take hundreds of police officers to do.”

During our dive into Flock Safety and the cameras in our community, through personal observation and contacts with local contractors, we found that websites purporting to identify camera locations have mislabeled other equipment, like CCTV cameras and even WiFi antennae, as Flock Safety cameras. The sites seem to rely on volunteer reports of camera locations but don’t explain how the data is collected. We aren’t saying everything on the sites is incorrect, just that they may have overstated the extent of the cameras in our county.

We also reached out to Flock Safety several times and received no response.