Feature: Non-Criminal Report
New feature: See how searches are used for non-criminal purposes — testing, training, civil code enforcement, traffic studies, background checks, and more.
A new report is now available: Non-Criminal Report.
Flock’s product is sold as crime-fighting or “public safety.” But a meaningful share of searches have nothing to do with criminal law enforcement. This report surfaces those searches so communities can see what else the cameras are being used for.
What it captures
The report identifies searches whose stated reasons fall into categories that are clearly non-criminal:
- System tests, calibration, demos, tutorials, orientation exercises
- Municipal ordinance violations, zoning, blight, noise complaints, nuisance abatement, abandoned vehicles
- Overweight/oversize enforcement, DOT inspections, CDL checks, weigh stations
- Traffic studies and counts, congestion management, pedestrian surveys, road closures, speed studies
- Fleet inventory, repossessions, civil process service, evictions
- Background checks, pre-employment screening, school district verification, custody disputes, insurance claims
- Parking enforcement, street sweeping, towing
Records are excluded if they contain keywords associated with serious criminal activity (homicide, theft, warrants, narcotics, etc.), reducing false positives from searches that happen to mention a non-criminal term alongside a criminal one.
Why it matters
When a city council votes to fund a surveillance contract the pitch is almost always about stolen cars and violent crime. But if a substantial number of searches are for code enforcement, system testing, or checking whether someone lives in the right school district, that changes the cost-benefit calculation.
Some agencies and jurisdictions have policies and/or laws in place to restrict government use of surveillance systems to criminal investigations. In those jurisdictions, many of these searches would likely not pass muster.
Because of the networked nature of the Flock system, a local law or policy might prohibit use of the data for such non-criminal purposes, but agencies outside the jurisdiction are generally not bound by the same laws and policies.
Non-criminal uses are not inherently improper, but they do change the calculus.