Police credit license plate-reading cameras with helping locate the Brown University shooting suspect who killed two students in Providence and an MIT professor in Brookline. Yet the system behind that success has been under fire for operating without essential checks and balances.
Flock Safety, a company based in Atlanta, Georgia, is a leading producer of license-plate-reading cameras, leasing cameras and installing automatic license plate readers to help detect and investigate crime. The company has worked with nearly 100 police departments in Massachusetts and 250 in New England.
The cameras are installed along the state’s toll roads. Plus, some Massachusetts police departments — and private citizens — have been installing similar technology along smaller roads throughout the state.
In October, Chestnut Hill Realty began installing Flock license plate reader cameras along Independence Drive near South Brookline and West Roxbury, which caused a stir in the community, according to Boston.com. The Brookline community has been questioning the use of surveillance cameras for nearly two decades, the news outlet reported.
Earlier this month, Cambridge cut ties with Flock Safety. The city said it plans to conduct a thorough evaluation of this type of technology in Cambridge and “looks forward to re-engaging with the City Council and broader community about this technology.”
Beyond identifying vehicle license plates, Flock Safety license plate reader cameras identify vehicles by their make, color or decals even if the vehicle doesn’t have a license plate. The technology isn’t designed to capture pedestrians, sidewalks or other areas with non-vehicle traffic. And it needs adequate cellular service in order to process and send images, said Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin.
One Flock license plate reader camera can capture two lanes of traffic and is able to record 30,000 vehicles per day while running on solar and wireless infrastructure, according to Flock promotional material obtained by a records request.
Around 4 p.m. on Dec. 13, gunfire erupted on the first floor of Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering and physics building during an economics class. The shooting left sophomore Ella Cook and first-year student Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov dead and nine other students injured.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the gunman slipped away.
Around 8:30 p.m. on Monday, police responded to a report of gunshots at a Brookline apartment building and discovered a man, later identified as Nuno Loureiro, 47, in the foyer who had been shot multiple times.
Loureiro was taken to Beth Israel Hospital and later pronounced dead.
Loureiro was a professor of nuclear science and engineering and the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, according to the university’s website.
Once again, the shooter got away.
Then officials got a tip about a man with a key fob trying to get into a car. They put the description of the car, a gray Nissan, into Flock.
“We learned that within that time period, there was only a certain amount of vehicles that came up with those description fitting it,” Providence Police Col. Oscar L. Perez Jr. said at a press conference in Rhode Island Thursday night, during which authorities announced the suspect was found dead in Salem, New Hampshire.
Suddenly, more puzzle pieces starting fitting together.
From there, officials learned about the car having Florida plates, how the plates could’ve been changed and ultimately how the car was a rental.
“This is why we built Flock Safety — is for moments like this,“ Josh Thomas, chief communications officer at Flock Safety, told MassLive Friday. “No one wants this to happen. This is tragic. But a serial killer was caught.”
The gray Nissan was a rental from an Alamo Rent-A-Car in downtown Boston, court documents state. It had last been rented by 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente on Dec. 1. Video footage from the Alamo Rent-A-Car showed him wearing clothing matching that of the suspect from the Brown shooting.
Neves Valente was ultimately identified as the shooter at Brown University and at a Brookline home, killing 47-year-old MIT professor Nuno Loureiro.
“We got him,” FBI Boston Special Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said during a press conference Thursday.
Neves Valente had taken his own life in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.
Prior to the discovery of Neves Valente’s body, Providence police were set to charge him with 25 counts, including two charges of first-degree murder, according to court documents.
Concerns about Flock
But this type of technology isn’t just tracking people involved in situations like what happened at Brown University.
“They’re not just collecting information about people who are suspected of crimes. They’re collecting information about everyone indiscriminately and that’s one of the major problems with this technology,” Kade Crockford, the Technology for Liberty program director for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told MassLive in 2023.
Crockford has continued to raise the question over the past two years, telling Boston.com in October that government agencies are building massive databases to track people’s movements.
“That raises very serious constitutional questions,” Crockford said.
Texas law enforcement used Flock’s national database to track a woman to Massachusetts regarding an abortion, according to 404 Media. The news outlet also reported that police have searched Flock on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
The ACLU of Northern California found in 2019 that more than 80 local law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen states agreed to share license plate location information with ICE.
Flock said it does not have any partnerships with ICE but that local police in certain parts of the country can partner with the agency.
“It’s their choice. It’s not our choice,” Thomas said.
There isn’t a Massachusetts law that limits how long police departments can store the information they get from the cameras or how they can share it or use it once it has been collected.
The ACLU of Massachusetts has been working on a bill for years to limit who could use an automatic license plate reader system and how long the data from the license plate readers can be stored.
“Most people left, right, and center think yeah, it’s not appropriate for the police to just track where I’m driving all the time and be able to keep that information for as long as they want and do anything they want with it. That there ought to be some basic checks and balances and rules in place,” Crockford said.
Crockford said the ACLU of Massachusetts would prefer if the police or those who used the technology would have to delete the data collected by the cameras once it became clear the footage wasn’t related to an investigation of a serious crime. She said two days would be sufficient to determine if the footage is necessary to keep or not.
“Our position is not that we ought to ban license plate readers. Our position is that there needs to be some basic checks and balances. In the law to protect people’s civil rights while at the same time allowing police to use license plate readers to investigate crimes not to amass detailed driving records,” Crockford said in 2023.
But Thomas fears this level of regulation would allow criminals, such as the Brown University shooter, to get away since he wasn’t caught for five days.
“How should the technology be regulated ... We can debate the length of time, but we have to give law enforcement enough time to be able to actually perform an investigation,” Thomas said. “That’s why Flock settled on 30 days as our default data retention. It is not years and years.”
Flock has had other success in various parts of New England, including after another Rhode Island shooting, a hit-and-run that killed a 72-year-old in Lowell in November, a police chase in Quincy in October and when a Massachusetts man killed a 16-year-old that officials said was carried out like an execution.
“We’re catching serial killers,“ Thomas said. ”This is what this technology should be used for.”
MassLive reporter Juliet Schulman-Hall contributed to this reporting.