New Castle, PA put Flock in its only Majority-Minority Neighborhood

New Castle, Pennsylvania — a city of about 22,000 in Lawrence County, roughly 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh — has deployed its entire police surveillance network inside a single census tract: the only one in the city where white residents are not a majority. A Flock event log spanning June 2023 through April 2026 also shows that its sole license plate reader and one pan-tilt-zoom camera both face the same basketball court, and that a group of officers has run scores of license plates through private watchlists — almost none carrying a case number, and many set never to expire.

The latest available information indicates the department holds a contract with Flock for a single LPR camera, one PTZ camera, and twenty-nine Raven “gunshot” detectors.^[1]

HaveIBeenFlocked.com typically limits itself to analyzing LPR logs and license plate queries — not because the other logs the system produces aren’t interesting, but because the site wasn’t built to ingest them automatically. When one resident examined Dunwoody’s event logs, his analysis showed Flock employees were watching children inside a community center. Thousands of other, unexamined logs exist.

The event log analyzed here was obtained from New Castle PD through a Pennsylvania Right-to-Know request; the request and released files are on MuckRock. It runs from June 28, 2023 through April 27, 2026 — nearly three years — and includes detailed hotlist entries, network sharing, and configuration updates.

#The Hardware

New Castle PD’s Flock account includes 31 active devices. Most of them — 29 — are Raven units, Flock’s acoustic detection sensors.

All 31 devices — the ALPR, the surveillance camera, and all 29 gunshot detectors — are located in or immediately adjacent to census tract 42073000400.

That tract has a population of 1,776. It is the only census tract in New Castle where white residents are not a majority. Its demographic profile compared to the rest of the city:

Tract 42073000400 has the highest Black population share in Lawrence County by a wide margin. The next-highest tract in New Castle is at 18.9%. The city’s whiter, more suburban tracts — most with Black populations under 5% — have no Flock devices at all.

The other two devices are:

• One Falcon (ALPR): #01 Lowery St @ W Falls St SB — the department’s only license plate reader, with live video and vehicle description alert capability.
• One PTZ (connected via Wing): C001 W North St Park PTZ — a pan-tilt-zoom surveillance camera at W North Street Park, capable of live streaming and free-form visual search of people.

Both face the same basketball court.

#The watchlists: private, undocumented, and tracking individuals

Flock’s event log records when anyone creates or modifies a custom hotlist. These hotlists — which can be “personal” to a single Flock user or shared among many agencies — generate an alert whenever a tracked plate is spotted by any camera on the Flock network.

New Castle PD officers maintain two categories of hotlists. One category is lists of plates tied to active cases, with case numbers, defined expiration dates, and organization-wide visibility. Several officers — Hailey Houk, Branddon Hallowich, Eric Kerr, Peter Mendicino — use the system this way.

The second category is different. Seven officers — Amanda Ventura, Justin Manns, Lawrence Krauss, Devin Murphey, Benjamin Cunningham, Theo Weaver, and Mark Workman — each operate a private hotlist, several of them shared among the group rather than with the department. The lists carry their operators’ own names: Ventura, Manns, KRAUSS, NCPD#23 (Murphey), cunningham, Weaver, and Workman.

Across the log, officers added 99 plate entries to those seven lists. Just four carry a case number. The other 95 do not. Twenty-eight are set never to expire.

The Ventura list is the most extensively documented: 31 entries added between March 2024 and April 2026, and not one of them carries a case number. Many give a person’s name as the sole stated reason for surveillance — entries reading Narcotics. [name] set to expire never, or narcotics, [name], also never. Others name an individual with no stated reason at all. One entry’s reason is simply Picking up kids, expiry never; another is the street address 707 S Cascade.

The expiry field is where the absence of process becomes concrete. A plate tied to an active case expires when the case closes. An entry that names a private individual and is set to expire never is a permanent surveillance designation, attached to a person, that no one is scheduled to review.

Two Ventura entries are worth quoting in full. One gives its reason as High theft probably — surveillance premised, by the officer’s own notation, on a hunch. Another gives its reason as welfare. Neither carries a case number.

The Manns list holds 34 entries over a similar period — 33 with no case number — tagged with names and terse notes such as narc complaint, Fbi narc, and homicide. It is shared with Ventura. One Manns entry inverts the form entirely: a string that looks like a case number, 24-0000082, is typed into the reason field, while the actual case field sits empty — a small sign of how loosely the structured fields are treated.

The cunningham list is the starkest: seven entries, every one with the reason narcotics, six of the seven set to expire never, and not a case number among them.

NCPD#23, Murphey’s list, tracks two Ohio plates under the reason Nephew. Richard Conti added the same two Ohio plates to a group list named Fitty a short time later — that time with a narcotics case number attached. Conti also created a vehicle description alert — a Flock feature that generates real-time notifications when a specific vehicle appears on a camera — named Nephew, targeting a blue Mazda sedan on the Lowery St ALPR during evening and overnight hours. He deleted the alert less than a minute after creating it.

#Late-night camera access

The event log also records when officers opened a live view of the park PTZ camera. Of the 77 recorded accesses, the great majority fall in ordinary business and evening hours, by administrators. Every access in the small hours of the morning belongs to one of two officers: Amanda Ventura or Lawrence Krauss.

The pattern is tight. Late on December 30, 2025, Krauss opened the camera four times in roughly nine minutes, beginning at 11:47pm. Five days later, just after midnight on January 4, 2026, Ventura opened it eleven times in forty-five seconds: 12:19:01am to 12:19:46am.

The log shows what preceded that burst: at 12:04am, Krauss had added a plate, MWR4095, to his KRAUSS list, reason “Stolen”; at 12:11am, Ventura added the same plate to the department’s shared list, reason “Stolen out of NCPD”; eight minutes later she was hammering the live camera. Two officers and one vehicle, inside twenty minutes after midnight.

The pattern recurs on April 22, 2026, when Ventura accessed the camera three times between 3:52am and 4:32am. Krauss, for his part, has also shared plates into Ventura’s personal watchlist, tracking some of the same individuals.

#What the department shares — and with whom

New Castle PD operates a single Flock network, “New Castle PA PD,” and its administrator, Anthony Lagnese, is responsible for the bulk of the department’s sharing of it. The log records more than 300 network shares of New Castle’s camera data, extending feed and hotlist access to over 100 named law enforcement agencies across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Recipients include the Lawrence County District Attorney, the Allegheny County District Attorney, the Montgomery County Detective Bureau, “Pennsylvania State PD,” and dozens of municipal departments as far afield as Pittsburgh, Bethel Park, and a string of eastern Ohio agencies.

In March 2026, the department’s live stream interface also surfaced a camera it had no obvious connection to: a camera that appears to be a RedSpeed automated speed enforcement camera, located on a highway in central Georgia, hundreds of miles from New Castle.

Why a Pennsylvania department’s interface surfaced a Georgia speed camera is not explained anywhere in the log. The most benign reading is also the most damning one: that Flock’s network sharing is indiscriminate enough to put an unrelated camera, in another state, into a small-city police department’s live feed by default.

This website previously documented that RedSpeed has a Flock integration. New Castle’s log entries seemingly confirm that traffic enforcement cameras can be, and are, used for live-streaming video.

#What wasn’t answered

The event log does not record what happened when a tracked plate was spotted. It does not show whether the named individuals on the Ventura and Manns lists were ever stopped, arrested, or surveilled in person. It does not show whether any supervisor reviewed or approved any of the private hotlists.

That last gap is the point. Oversight of a watchlist depends on two things: a case number that ties an entry to a documented investigation, and an expiration date that forces the entry to be revisited.

Ninety-five of the ninety-nine entries on these seven lists have no case number; twenty-eight have no expiration. Even if the department wanted to audit its own use of the system — and even if it would disclose basic case information to the public — there is nothing to audit against. An entry reading welfare, attached to a named person, set to expire never, is unreviewable by design. The absence of case numbers makes oversight structurally impossible.

The only thing the logs do show is that New Castle PD pointed its only two cameras at a single basketball court, and that for nearly three years, officers have been adding entries — most of them permanent, almost none documented — to private watchlists connected to a national surveillance network, in the one neighborhood that is, by a wide margin, the most heavily Black in the county.

Through its blog, Flock says it “aims to advance both safety and equity together” through “data-driven responses.” This is what that looks like in Pennsylvania.