The Franklin Reporter & Advocate Eight Villages, One Community
The 27 Flock Safety automatic license plate readers now mounted on poles around Franklin Township were bought with good intentions. A $339,000 state technology grant was available. A four-year contract was signed in October 2025. The Township Council did what more than 6,000 communities across the country have done, and accepted a public safety tool that appeared to cost taxpayers nothing.
The bill is coming due anyway, and it is not being paid in dollars.
The Council should cancel its contract with Flock Safety, if the agreement and the law permit it. If they do not, the Township should do what a growing number of communities have done in the meantime: cover the cameras, disconnect them and leave them dark until the Township can get out.
Before we get into it, let’s be clear about what the Franklin Reporter & Advocate is not saying.
We are not suggesting that the Franklin Township Police Department will misuse this system. Public Safety Director Lloyd Fredericks told residents on Aug. 11 that every search requires a case number, an offense type and a stated reason, all preserved in an audit trail, and that the department audits itself quarterly and at random each month on top of the annual review New Jersey requires. He said there has been no misuse. We take him at his word, and we do not believe the failures documented in other departments are a forecast of what Franklin’s officers would do. The sins of Illinois and Los Angeles are not Franklin’s sins.
A councilwoman in Christiansburg, Virginia, put the distinction better than we can. Explaining her vote last week to tear out that town’s cameras, Johana Hicks said: “It’s not that we don’t trust our police officers, because we do; we don’t trust the data collection, we don’t trust the system.”
That is our position exactly. Our concern was never the officers at the keyboard in Franklin’s own police headquarters. It is everyone else who can reach into this system from outside the Township’s borders.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s get into it. Submitted for your review:
- Here’s what the Township learned in a single evening. Fredericks and Flock’s public affairs manager, Carl Bach, described a 30-day deletion window. Then Township Councilwoman Kimberly Francois pressed, and Bach conceded that in New Jersey the retention period is three years “across the board.” Thirty days was never the answer. It took a Council member’s persistence to establish the real one.
- Here is what the Township has not told residents. According to a published report, Franklin’s plate data is shared with 54 outside law enforcement agencies. Not consulted. Not petitioned. Shared. Down the road in Edison the figure is 88, including departments in New York, Texas and California, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and regional intelligence centers. Every one of those agencies has its own officers, its own supervision and its own idea of a good reason. Franklin’s Township Council has never voted on a single one of them.
- And this is what happened in Illinois. Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias released an audit last year finding that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had searched license plate data collected on Illinois roads, in apparent violation of a state law barring exactly that. Flock CEO Garrett Langley did not dispute it. “We clearly communicated poorly,” he said. “We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users.” No local police chief authorized those searches. No local council voted on them. The data simply moved.
- Then there’s the contract itself. Flock removed its no-sale language from its standard terms on Feb. 16, after more than 5,000 municipal agreements had been signed. Bach told the Council that the company has since amended Franklin’s contract to make explicit that the Township owns 100% of its data and that Flock does not sell it. That is welcome. It is also a private company’s promise about a private company’s database, and the promise was rewritten once already without a single resident being consulted.
Consider, too, what the Township’s own public dashboard says. The FTPD “Community Impact” portal reports 652,875 unique vehicles detected in Franklin in a 30-day period, alongside 298,606 “hotlist hits.” When we asked whether that second figure could possibly be real, Fredericks explained that it is a national number, not a count of vehicles flagged by Franklin police.
We do not doubt him. But read that again. The Township’s public accounting of its own cameras reports a nationwide figure, because Franklin’s cameras are not really Franklin’s cameras. They are 27 nodes on a network of more than 120,000 readers in 49 states, and the Township’s page cannot describe what happens here without describing what happens everywhere.
Fredericks also confirmed something residents should know. Flock and the other surveillance cameras in use by the Township, these being the 17 Meraki cameras installed at intersections and in Township parks, can capture identifying features beyond the plate, including bumper stickers and flags, media that tell a stranger what a driver believes.
And while the Township’s Meraki cameras cannot read plates today, that is a matter of software, not hardware; commercial plate-reading applications are sold specifically to connect to those camera streams. The capability could be acquired in the future.
Fredericks’s assurances rest on the audit log: every search stamped with a case number, a reason and a name. It is a real control, and Franklin appears to be using it conscientiously.
But that log did not save Lufkin, Texas. On Aug. 20, an officer there was booked on roughly 100 felony counts after investigators found he had run an ex-girlfriend’s plate through Flock more than 10,000 times between June 2024 and December 2025, along with other plates searched more than a thousand times each. The affidavit says the plates had no connection to any past or current department investigation. Every one of those searches was logged, in a system with the same controls Franklin relies on, and for 18 months no one read the log. What finally triggered the internal review was an outsider’s public records request in August. Lufkin has since suspended its Flock system entirely.
That case is not an outlier. The Institute for Justice has now documented 52 incidents nationally of officers allegedly using plate readers to track romantic interests, most of them since 2024. In several, the misuse surfaced only because victims looked themselves up on a public website built from Flock audit logs. As the Institute noted, only a handful of these cases were caught by the internal investigations that are supposed to catch them.
An audit log is a record of what happened. It is not a lock on the door, and it protects no one until somebody opens it and reads it. Franklin’s department reads its own. It does not read the logs of the other 54 agencies.
Township Attorney Lou Rainone told the Council on August 11 that reading a plate is not a search, “but if it becomes systematic … there’s a point at which that act becomes a violation of someone’s Fourth Amendment rights.” That is, in our opinion, the correct reading of Carpenter v. United States.
It is not yet the law. In January, a federal judge in Virginia upheld Norfolk’s 200-camera Flock network, holding that fixed cameras on public roads are not the continuous tracking Carpenter addressed. That case is now before the Fourth Circuit, undecided. A Washington appeals court reached a similar conclusion.
We think those courts will eventually have to confront the difference between one camera and 100,000 of them. But a town cannot govern on a ruling that has not been issued. If Franklin residents are to be protected from systematic tracking, the protection has to come from the Council, because it is not going to arrive from the Bench in time.
Meanwhile, no one has answered the question Councilwoman Francois’s colleagues should have asked in October 2025. At the Aug. 11 meeting, neither Rainone nor Township Manager Robert Vornlocker could say whether Flock would indemnify Franklin if a false hit led to a wrongful arrest and a civil rights suit. “The civil rights violation is always foisted upon the public and not the private party,” Rainone said at the time.
That exposure is not hypothetical. A Los Angeles Police Department audit found 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in two months, a false positive rate near 33%. In Sherwood, Arkansas, a couple were ordered out of their car at gunpoint over a misread digit while their 6-week-old baby sat in the back seat. Fredericks says Franklin has had no false positives so far. We hope that holds. Nothing in the contract guarantees it will, and nothing in the contract says who pays if it doesn’t.
Against all of this, what has the Township gained? Fredericks offered real cases, and we do not dismiss them. A hit-and-run that might have been solved in days instead of eight weeks. A man with dementia found in New York City. Those matter.
Other places have used the same scale and reached a different answer. An analysis published Aug. 28, based on figures compiled by the privacy group Secure Justice, counted 214 cities and counties that had dropped Flock since 2021. The group subsequently put the number ending their relationships with Flock in August alone at 93. Flock counters that it is still gaining municipal customers at roughly 10 times the rate of nonrenewals. Fair enough. But 93 governments walking away in a single month is more than a handful of privacy activists shouting into the wind
Among those towns and states that have canceled contracts, rejected proposals or deactivated their readers:
- Christiansburg voted 6-0 on Aug. 26 to terminate.
- Ord, Nebraska, voted in August to remove its cameras.
- Asheville’s mayor pushed to end that city’s contract over “growing concerns around Flock just as a company, how they manage their data, how well it’s protected.”
- Harrisonburg, Virginia, voted 4-0 to terminate.
- Dayton, Evanston, Oak Park, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Mountain View, Oxnard and Staunton have all pulled out.
- The police chief in Salida, Colorado, dropped the system himself, citing community concerns about “privacy, data retention, access to information, and inappropriate use.”
- Florida went considerably further; its Department of Transportation revoked permits for automated license plate readers on state highways and ordered the devices removed within 30 days. Several Florida jurisdictions are consequently discontinuing their systems.
The pressure is no longer only local. On Aug. 26, Sen. Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism, opened an investigation into Flock, demanding records on access policies, camera placement and every known misuse incident since 2021. “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built,” he wrote.
Bills to require warrants for plate-reader searches, to bar federal agencies from the networks, or to strip federal funding from departments that use them have been introduced this year by Reps. Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert, Tim Burchett and Keith Self, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and Sen. Bernie Sanders have both said they will seek outright bans. Lawmakers in 34 states have filed nearly 100 plate-reader bills this year.
And in California, two drivers are suing Flock in a proposed class action alleging that out-of-state and federal agencies ran 1.6 million searches against San Francisco’s camera data in a six-month stretch, and more than a million against tiny Los Altos. Flock says it will defend itself vigorously. Whatever the outcome, the numbers themselves are the argument: this is what “your data stays local” looks like in practice.
Langley calls the cancellations the product of “misinformation.” One hundred forty-nine municipalities is not a misunderstanding. It is a verdict.
There are roughly 1,530 plate readers deployed across all 21 New Jersey counties, and 523 of the state’s approximately 530 law enforcement agencies now use the technology. Our three-year retention period is among the longest in the country; much of the nation deletes in 30 days, and some jurisdictions in minutes. The rules that bar sharing plate data for civil immigration or reproductive-health cases are not statutes. They are Attorney General Directive 2022-12, an administrative document that a future Attorney General can revise the way Flock revised its terms in February.
Trenton has noticed. State Sen. Michael Testa Jr. plans to introduce legislation this month to write ALPR privacy protections into statute rather than leave them to directive. State Sen. Linda Greenstein has a bill barring the sharing of New Jersey plate data with states investigating travel for reproductive care.
In Camden County, a group called DeFlock South Jersey is organizing to have readers removed until oversight exists. A statewide petition asks the governor, the Legislature and the Attorney General for guardrails on retention, search authorization and out-of-state access.
Every one of those efforts is an admission that the safeguards residents were told to rely on do not yet exist.
Flock, to its credit, announced changes on Aug. 13: a seven-day default retention period, mandatory case codes, multi-factor authentication, an automatic lockout for abnormal search patterns and an outside security review. Those are improvements. Read the fine print, though. Existing customers keep their current retention unless they opt in, and Franklin’s three years is set in Trenton, not Atlanta. The rest is a reminder that the terms of this arrangement are written by a private company and can be rewritten by it.
Township residents delivered their verdict on Franklin’s use of Flock cameras on Aug. 11, in a packed Council chamber, speaker after speaker. The de facto leader of the opposition, Township resident Frank Sciara, created a petition that now carries more than 900 signatures asking the Council to terminate the contract and ban the equipment from the Township.
Only three Council members responded to two queries from the Franklin Reporter in the days after that meeting. Francois voiced misgivings about the technology. Councilman Ram Anbarasan said it is the Council’s duty to review the contract for “possible improvements.” Councilman Shubhendu Singh, who was not a Council member when the contract was approved, said he needs to talk to his constituents. That’s a start, but it’s not enough.
Reviewing a contract is what a governing body does when it hopes a problem will subside. Franklin’s residents did not ask for a review. They asked their Council to stop.
Public safety is a genuine obligation, and no one pretends otherwise. Fredericks told us the cameras “were a luxury, but now they have become a necessity to protect the community.” We understand why a public safety director would say so. But a low-crime Township does not owe a private surveillance company a permanent record of where its residents drive, who they visit, which house of worship they attend and which clinic they park outside, and it certainly does not owe that record to 54 agencies it has never voted on.
Township resident Leslie Primo put it bluntly and correctly, “We can police without stalking.”
Township Council members, cancel the contract. If the lawyers say it cannot be canceled soon, cover the cameras and unplug them until it can be. Then come back to residents with a proposal built in the open, before the poles go up, rather than after.
