Reported dead in May, live by September: Pawtucket's $128,000 Flock deployment

On an early fall afternoon in 2023, midway through a shift in Pawtucket's District Five, Rhode Island officer Noel Pichardo made a U-turn on West Avenue to get a second look at a compact, solar-powered camera on a utility pole, angled down at passing traffic ^[1]. He kept driving, checked the roads near highway ramps, the major intersections, the routes in and out of the city, and found more of them ^[2]; according to WIRED, what he had found was a Flock Safety plate-reader system his own department had begun deploying that September under a two-year, $128,000 agreement ^[3].

The sequence is the story. In 2021, Flock offered Pawtucket police a free 60-day pilot, and 17 cameras went up as part of a regional test that also included Cranston and Woonsocket, according to records reviewed by WIRED ^[4]. The ACLU of Rhode Island accused the department of installing the cameras surreptitiously, after the pilot began without prior public input or notice to the city council ^[5]. Chief Tina Goncalves later apologized and said the department would "work better in the future" to communicate with the city council ^[6]. The pilot ended that year, and in May 2023 local TV news reported that Pawtucket was not moving forward with an installation ^[7]. About four months later, records show, the city committed to the paid deployment, with 20 cameras planned for Newport Avenue, Main Street, Broadway, Smithfield Avenue, and West Avenue, where Pichardo first noticed one ^[3][1][2].

That is the shape of the oversight the buyer claimed to have: an apology and a promise to communicate, with no procedure attached to it. The money is small by design. At 20 cameras, $128,000 works out to $6,400 per camera across the term, roughly $3,200 a camera-year ^[3][4], which reads on a ledger like equipment rather than policy.

What the city was buying was not 20 poles. At the 2021 briefing at a Pawtucket police substation, a high-ranking official explained that Flock's readers could identify vehicles not only by plate but by bumper stickers, roof racks, and other distinguishing features, and that investigators could search for a car across jurisdictions and reconstruct, camera by camera, where it had been ^[8]. It was presented as routine work: stolen cars, suspects, missing people ^[9]. Flock markets the platform as the nation's largest fixed plate-reader network, processing billions of sightings each month ^[10]. Because departments can open their records to agencies elsewhere, a camera one municipality installs can become searchable by investigators hundreds or thousands of miles away ^[11]. Access, in other words, is a configuration decision made after the purchase order.

The internal signal is as telling as the public one. Pichardo had sat through the vendor presentation and understood the proposal had gone nowhere because the city could not afford a permanent installation, so he treated it as a dead letter ^[12]. He learned otherwise from the driver's seat. "Wait a minute," he recalled thinking. "When did we make this decision to put these up?" ^[13]

Within months, per WIRED, his questions set off a chain of events that he says ended his career in law enforcement, and placed him at the center of a backlash against Flock that unites large factions of the American left and right ^[14].