Fall River police entered vague, nonsensical reasons for Flock searches

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A deep dive into Fall River’s use of Flock license-plate cameras finds similar problems that have surfaced in New Bedford and elsewhere: lack of oversight as police officers used the technology thousands of times since 2021 while entering vague or nonsensical reasons for their searches.

The findings come amid national scrutiny and backlash over Flock use by police departments, with citizens raising privacy, misconduct, oversight and accountability concerns. 

Officers don’t need reasonable suspicion or probable cause to search, and when they document their reasons for querying the system, they often don’t input much detail.  

Such was the case in Fall River, which has used the camera network since 2021. In 2025, Fall River police officers conducted more than 15,000 searches of Flock cameras inside and outside of the city, sometimes in other states. 

Reasons officers entered included investigation, “inv,” “invest,” a period, single letters and, in a few instances, a combination of letters as if a person randomly hit computer keys (“mnl;k”). For a few searches, no reason was inputted. And in most searches, officers did not enter an associated case number or call number, according to five years of use data reviewed by The Light.

Critics of Flock say it is insufficient for officers to only write “investigation” as a search reason: it is too vague and makes oversight challenging.

Many police departments have not required their officers to give substantial reasons or documentation for their searches. 

That’s changing. In August, Flock announced that case numbers will be required for all searches by the end of the year, with the ability to bypass the requirement for emergencies. Data from 2026 shows that in August, Fall River officers entered case numbers in more than half their searches. 

Fall River Acting Police Chief J.T. Hoar, who assumed the position in April after serving as a deputy chief, said Fall River police started auditing and looking “more in depth” at officers’ use in January. 

The department adopted a new Flock policy in January, and Hoar says he intends to update it again. 

“I think ultimately the public is going to want accountability on this,” Hoar said. “You have to have a good policy in place.” 

Hoar said supervisors reviewing past Flock use are looking for trends. To dig deeper, he said, they would need a “triggering event,” such as a complaint. He said it would be “unreasonable” and “inappropriate” to go through data that is four to five years old, line by line, and re-run the plates.

Dave Maass, director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit, said police departments are forgoing privacy interests for convenience. 

Flock, he said, set up a system that is challenging to audit because it encourages officers to search often (they can even search from their phones). It creates an enormous haystack, Maass said, that makes it “almost impossible” to find abuse.  

“When you have a police chief saying it’s unreasonable to go through [it] line by line, what he is saying is it is unreasonable for him to ensure that every single one of these [Flock searches] was legitimate,” Maass said.  

Policy problems

In New Bedford, the police chief found that the department’s Flock policy was insufficient in several areas. Other agencies are also updating their policies to add guardrails — or beginning to audit officers’ use in response to public scrutiny or inquiries from journalists.

Hoar said he found Fall River’s original policy, under which tens of thousands of Flock searches happened, “deficient.” It was issued in 2012, years before Flock was founded, when the department used a license plate reader mounted on a cruiser. The policy was in place until January, when a revised one was implemented. 

In 2025, Fall River police officers tagged more than half of their 15,000 searches with “investigation” or abbreviations of it (like “inv”). Previous years trended similarly, with more than half the searches tagged with a vague reason. 

Late last year, Flock introduced a drop-down menu for search reasons, which meant no more typos or single-letter inputs by officers. Menu choices include “Drugs/Narcotics — Drug investigation” and “Assault/Battery Offenses (Domestic).” In 2026 through August, the top search reasons in Fall River were weapons offenses and narcotics. Illegal dumping accounted for nearly 10% of searches. 

Maass said the drop-down selection gives the “veneer” of legitimacy for searches. They are more specific than “.” or “inv,” but they can also be misused. This happened in New Bedford. One officer selected “traffic infraction” as the reason for hundreds of searches to track her ex-girlfriend, investigators found. 

From 2021 through 2025, under 3% of Fall River’s searches had case numbers, the data shows. In the first half of this year, under 10% of searches had a case number, call number or other specific reference numbers. But more recently, officers have been inputting the information. In August, about 70% of searches had reference numbers, compared to only about 9% in July. 

Hoar said the previous policy and Flock system did not require officers to enter case or call numbers. He said the reference numbers would make auditing for legitimate use easier, but that sometimes officers are running Flock searches before a case number has been created, or when a Flock search is urgent. 

“The issue is really one of efficiency and access to timely information,” Hoar said by email following interviews with The Light. He gave an example of an armed robbery. “Officers may also use Flock, if they have access, to quickly search for the vehicle … Requiring a call number adds another step to that process.”

“In many situations that may not seem like a significant burden, but during an active incident, timely information matters,” Hoar continued. “My concern is making sure we have appropriate safeguards and accountability without unnecessarily creating additional steps that could slow down” an officer.

Hoar said he plans to update the department’s policy again, but wants to await guidance and actions from other groups, including the state Legislature and the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. Right now, the policy doesn’t say how often audits must be conducted. 

He said annually would be too infrequent, but that he’s trying to find the “sweet spot” after reviewing logs daily in recent months with a captain. He quipped that he sleeps with Flock logs “baked into his eyes.” 

New Bedford’s police chief recently began requiring monthly audits. The Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association head recommends quarterly audits at minimum. 

Why search cars and plates? “99,” “gfgf,” “Mmmmm,” police typed

The Light’s data review of Fall River’s Flock use is limited. Fall River withheld license plate information, so The Light cannot determine how often officers are searching for certain plates — which can sometimes be a sign of abuse for personal purposes. In New Bedford, two police officers face possible firing after an internal affairs investigation found each used Flock to surveil a current or former romantic partner.

But we can see how they explained their searches and how often they were using the tool. 

A few Fall River officers entered “99” often last year as the search reason. Hoar said “99” is code for “all other” — another tag that does not explain why the officer was searching a plate. 

One officer used “99” more than 1,000 times. Another used it for about 70% of his nearly 800 searches. Another used it about 175 times. None of their “99” searches were accompanied by case numbers, with the exception of a few searches that might contain parts of case numbers. 

Hoar said the officer’s use of “99” over 1,000 times was a “training deficiency” and that he and other supervisors will look into those searches and address them accordingly. In a follow-up call, Hoar said the department has not identified any misuse so far. Instead, he said he’s found a “gap in consistency” that a revised policy should address.

Another officer entered a period (“.”) as the reason for nearly 90 of his searches last year (it accounted for just under one-quarter of his searches); for three, he entered a case number.

Other entries over the years by Fall River police officers include single and triple-digit numbers, letters (x, y, l, h, a, z, c), “gfgf” (no case number), “jlk” (no case number), “Mmmmm” (no case number), and “123” (no case number). Though entered by officers, Hoar said there are no single- or triple-digit codes officially used by the department (in contrast with two-digit codes like 32 and 41, which are shorthand for car accident and arrest, respectively). 

One Fall River officer made a habit over the years of entering “inv” as his search reason, but with varying numbers of Vs, sometimes more than a dozen. His entries create a vertical wave of text as a reader scrolls.

Button-mashing in Massachusetts

Fall River is not unique in officers seemingly utilizing “button mashing” and vague reasons, like a period and single characters. Officers from several departments were doing it, too. 

In Wareham, police officers have been entering such search reasons, Wareham Week reported last week. 

Additional audit data from Fall River documents how outside agencies were accessing the city’s cameras as part of a regional or nationwide network. It shows Lynn and Quincy officers had used single letters, period or “other.” The Lynn Police Department has an ongoing investigation “into any officer who used the system improperly,” a department official said. Meanwhile, Quincy Police Chief Mark Kennedy said Flock has since updated the system to require a case number and reason through a drop-down menu: “It is no longer possible to enter a ‘.’” 

In Braintree, a police officer wrote “Dududu” on multiple days without a case number. Braintree Police Chief Robert Kilroy by email said it “appears to have been the result of generic data entry.” 

“Several months ago, our system administrator also identified this exact issue,” he wrote. “Upon locating the unusual search reason, he met with the officer in question… The officer informed us that it had no specific meaning or relevance, rather he utilized it hastily once and it became part of his autofill options, so he continued to use it.”  

Kilroy said he could not go into much detail as the officer is part of a group of investigators from several agencies “conducting long-term, sensitive investigations.” He said the “Dududu” searches were for legitimate law enforcement purposes and covered numerous vehicles, and that the department’s audit has not “indicated any other inappropriate use of the system.”

“We are currently in the process of updating our usage policy, requiring detailed search descriptions and/or case numbers, and implementing additional auditing tools and schedules,” Kilroy wrote.

(A former Braintree detective was charged this summer with harassment and is accused of using Flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend.)

According to tracking by the Institute for Justice, abuse of automatic license plate reader technology has been found at seven Massachusetts police agencies, with more than 200 incidents nationally, according to news reports.

Want to see who searched what? View and download Fall River police’s Flock data

Auditing grows, but can be time-consuming

This spring, Flock introduced an audit assistance tool, but it only works for 2026 data. It flags anomalous patterns for review by department supervisors. Anomalies don’t always mean misuse. It is with this tool that New Bedford police learned about potential (and later documented) misuse by two officers to track their current or ex-romantic partners. 

Hoar said the tool identified a plate run “numerous times.” The department questioned the two officers that were running the plate, he said, and verified that it was related to a drug investigation. Hoar said that because of a “training deficiency,” one officer failed to add the car to a “hot list,” so that when a camera picks it up, the officer would be automatically notified. “Instead of a hot list, he kept running [the plate],” Hoar said. The officer was retrained and given back access to the Flock system. 

Maass of the EFF said the more searches departments have, the harder it will be to audit.

“Does the internal affairs person want to sit down and pull every case?” he said. “It’s a system that just spirals out of control.”

Hoar said his department’s review of how officers used the system remains ongoing. Data from 2021, the year Fall River adopted Flock, through 2026, shows the number of officers using Flock increased from about 15 to nearly 80. 

The department previously had nationwide sharing activated, meaning Fall River officers could access the network of cameras beyond New England, and outside agencies could access theirs. But Fall River restricted it this year to sharing with Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, Hoar said.

“I think it’s a matter of having some control over who is accessing our data,” he said.

As another form of control, the department in December restricted searches for immigration purposes. 

Planned expansion amid vandalism

Hoar says Flock is a useful crime-solving tool, including after robberies and shootings, as well as missing-persons cases. Recently, he says, Flock helped police solve an attempted armed robbery (the masked suspect allegedly had a tire iron under his clothes to mimic a gun). Police ran the plate through Flock after they saw it had been captured on private surveillance video.

“I would say Flock was just an enhancement to this case; I wouldn’t say it was the sole factor in solving it,” he said. 

The department mentions Flock on Facebook when it posts about solving crimes, including the dumping of mattresses and furniture. 

Fall River has 41 cameras and is looking to install a few more with funding from National Grid.

A National Grid spokesperson said by email that the company is funding five Flock cameras as part of a transmission project that will run near the Copicut Reservoir. The spokesperson said there was discussion of dumping, littering and use of fireworks at the reservoir. Fall River will install and operate the cameras.  

Though the Fall River police chief likes the technology, at least one person in the area disagrees. Over the summer, three of Fall River’s Flock cameras were allegedly vandalized, according to police reports. 

Police observed that the wiring from the pole to one camera “appears to have been pulled from the device causing the connectors to be broken.” The reports redacted the camera locations, saying it would jeopardize public safety and security. The report also states the camera appears to have been moved to face a different direction days before the wires were pulled.

“The camera recorded numerous vehicles in the park as well as pedestrians walking and biking,” the officer wrote. 

At two other cameras, the wiring was also pulled and “hanging outside of the camera,” according to police reports.

Hoar said as of last week, they remained offline. 

Email Anastasia E. Lennon at alennon@newbedfordlight.org 

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