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What to know
- The New Bedford Police Department in late 2024 purchased and soon after installed Flock cameras. These devices, also known as automatic license plate readers, scan every car, make, model, color and license plate that drives by.
- That information becomes part of a data network that can be accessed by hundreds or thousands of law enforcement agencies, depending on the department’s system settings.
- There are 20 Flock cameras operating in the city as of June 2026, according to NBPD.
- Around the last week of November 2025, NBPD changed the data-sharing settings to opt out of nationwide sharing, data shows. Still, about 125 police departments have access to the images and data captured by New Bedford’s Flock system.
- Ward 1 Councilor Leo Choquette says the City Council’s attorney is evaluating whether the council has any standing to intervene or exercise authority over the city’s use of the system.
New Bedford residents will gather Tuesday night for a public meeting at Pulaski Elementary School to talk about Flock cameras. Also known as license plate readers, they scan every car, make, model, color and license plate that drives by.
The New Bedford Police Department bought and installed 20 Flock cameras or software around the city almost two years ago. Privacy concerns about them are growing.
These license plate readers, also found in neighboring Dartmouth and Fairhaven along busy roads and highways, contribute to a statewide and national network of eyes that enables law enforcement officers to follow a vehicle (and its owner or operator) across municipal and state lines.
Police say the camera system helps them solve crimes, including shootings, vandalism, missing persons and stolen vehicles. In New Bedford, police say the data is deleted after 30 days if it’s not flagged as relevant to an investigation.
But some residents are concerned about infringement on personal privacy and misuse of the data by law enforcement, an issue that has been reported nationally. Other critics question use of the data for federal immigration enforcement.
Data provided by the city shows NBPD stopped nationwide sharing, which included the federal government, around the last week of November 2025. About 125 police departments in Massachusetts and Rhode Island still have access to New Bedford’s camera footage.
Before this change, thousands of agencies accessed New Bedford’s data millions of times in 2025. Oftentimes, these other agencies are accessing thousands of other departments during the same search.
NBPD says federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), do not have access to New Bedford’s Flock data. Officers must also sign an agreement that they will not share the data for any use involving federal immigration enforcement. One line of data from 2026, though, shows one city officer wrote “immigration” as his reason for his Flock search.
Police Chief Jason Thody will speak at the Tuesday night meeting, as will a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Some on the South Coast are getting vocal about the cameras.
In Fairhaven, a town meeting member drafted a bylaw amendment to require the removal of the Flock system. To bring it to a vote, it needs signatures of support from Fairhaven voters. In New Bedford, residents have been taking to social media, including Nick LeBlanc, who noticed a Flock camera in front of his house a few weeks ago.
“Decisions are being made unilaterally and without communication to the public,” he said. “It felt like there was no attempt on behalf of the city to reach out to residents about it.”
LeBlanc wrote to city councilors about the issue, seeking answers. So did The Light.
What elected officials are saying
Of the seven city councilors who responded, some only by email, all said they had only learned the Flock cameras were in use within the last few weeks or months. NBPD has been using the technology since late 2024.
In November 2024, NBPD placed an order with an IT company for six “Flock Falcons” and 15 “Falcon Wing LPRs.” The bill came to $81,000. The city quietly installed the cameras in early 2025 and soon a handful of officers were using the system for shootings, a be-on-the-lookout, and a larceny. This year, about 70 city officers are or were using the system, recent data obtained by The Light show.
“I didn’t even know,” until recently, said Councilor-at-large Brian Gomes. Since he chairs the council’s public safety committee, he says, the administration should have informed him about it. “That’s the way things work in the City of New Bedford,” Gomes said.
“I’m pretty much against these cameras being put in there,” said Leo Choquette, Ward 1 councilor. “It’s a very serious and nonpartisan issue. We’re on the frontier of evolving case law on electronic surveillance.”
Choquette likened this level of government surveillance to North Korea and Soviet Russia, and said of the 15 constituents he has heard from, none are “pro-Flock.”
“I’m not happy they did it without public input,” Choquette said. “I think that perhaps the mayor and the police chief at the time assumed the public was not going to be for this, which would have been a correct assumption. I think it was easier for them to quietly put it through without really unveiling it publicly.”
Choquette said the City Council’s attorney is evaluating whether the council has any standing to intervene or authority over the city’s use of the system.
The Light requested comment from Mayor Jon Mitchell and submitted questions to the city, including why public input wasn’t sought before the system went up.
Jonathan Darling, the city’s public information officer, in an email said the questions should be directed to NBPD. Police Chief Jason Thody was not working for the city when NBPD deployed the system.
“Two years ago, the police department recommended the City adopt Flock cameras, citing the ability to track suspects as they travel across jurisdictions,” Darling wrote in an email. “Because municipalities surrounding New Bedford – Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Lakeville, Westport, Mattapoisett and Fall River – already had Flock cameras in place, the department thought it would be prudent for New Bedford to fill the coverage gap in the region.”
Freshman Councilor-at-large James Roy, who took office in January, said in an email that the NBPD’s FAQ about Flock, posted in June, is a “helpful step” but “neither provides the full picture nor substitutes for meaningful public engagement.”
The FAQ page does not disclose how many Flock cameras are operating. The Light reported this month that the city has 20 Flock cameras: seven are standalone systems; 13 are city-owned cameras equipped with the Flock software. The city in total operates 249 cameras, according to NBPD.
“I found out the same way a lot of people did — by noticing the telltale solar panels showing up on cameras around the city,” Roy wrote. “It wasn’t until I read your article that my suspicions were confirmed.”
Roy was critical of how the system was listed in this year’s budget document.
“Nowhere in the budget documents does it say ‘Flock Safety.’ It just says ‘annual subscription’ with Insight Public Sector,” Roy wrote.
Insight Public Sector, Inc., is a third-party technology company on the city’s invoices for the Flock system.
“Compare that to other entries in the same section, where the budget actually tells you what you’re buying,” Roy said. “If you’re a councilor reviewing hundreds of pages of budget documents, there would be no way to know that line item was for a citywide network of license plate reader cameras.”
Darling did not provide a response to a question about the budget language. In an earlier email, he said the city is set to start paying the annual subscription to Insight Public Sector in January 2027.
Councilor-at-large Naomi Carney said she knew the city was installing more cameras, but didn’t know what kind. She said she is “not that opposed” to license plate readers, saying too many people in New Bedford run red lights at intersections. She also said license plates are photographed on highways at tolls.
Ward 3 Councilor Shawn Oliver expressed his support for local law enforcement, but said “people have a right to be concerned and they have a right to know.”
Councilor-at-large Shane Burgo, in an email, wrote that he wants to “fully understand how the system operates, what oversight exists, and what safeguards are in place to prevent misuse” before considering “whether any additional transparency or policy changes are warranted.”
Councilor-at-large Ian Abreu said he wants to see how Tuesday’s forum goes.
“It’s too early to jump the gun as far as motions or ordinances … or pulling [the cameras] down. Let’s get some questions answered and we’ll take it from there,” he said. He said he wants the cameras clearly identified in future budgets.
Councilors Scott Pemberton, Joe Lopes, Derek Baptiste and Ryan Pereira did not respond to requests for comment before publication.
What the police chief and police data say
In an interview this month, Thody told The Light he had the data-sharing settings changed from nationwide to local: Massachusetts and Rhode Island agencies.
In the weeks before his July 2025 start date as chief and for months after, audit data obtained by The Light shows thousands of law enforcement departments across the country — in states including Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, New York, and Florida — accessed New Bedford data in their queries of vehicles. Federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the General Services Administration are also listed in 2025 network data.
Departments maintain data on how their officers use the system, and how outside agencies are accessing their data. These are known as audit reports, and there are two types: “Flock Organization Audit” and “Flock Network Audit.”
Since late November 2025, only New England agencies have appeared for outside searches into NBPD’s data, the data show. In November alone, when nationwide sharing was mostly activated, more than 300,000 searches and thousands of agencies accessed New Bedford data through their queries of Flock.
In December 2025, that dropped to about 27,000 searches and under 100 agencies.
NBPD’s FAQ says its system is “set up to share information only with Massachusetts law enforcement agencies and law enforcement agencies located within 50 miles of New Bedford for legitimate law enforcement purposes.” It says “nationwide sharing is not enabled.”
But the FAQ omits that NBPD had been part of nationwide sharing for almost one year.
Thody said if they get a verifiable request from an agency elsewhere, they would share the information.
“If Mississippi called us and said, ‘Hey, we think that this missing person, this silver alert, this kidnapped person is in New Bedford,’” and “we can verify it is legit and follows the same rules we would follow here, we would provide them with that information,” Thody said.
He cited a lack of standards and consistency with Flock technology as a reason why sharing is more limited for NBPD.
“If we all knew we were playing by the same set of rules … I’d be comfortable sharing it because of the potential for success,” he said. “But that one time where someone decided to abuse it, the whole system is going to lose credibility. So I think as time goes on and some of these regulations become more standardized and more national, we may be able to expand this technology to the benefit of public safety. We’re not there yet.”
A report in 404media showed ICE was tapping local law enforcement agencies as a sort of “back door” or “side door” to access the license plate data.
Asked about the potential for unapproved agencies to access NBPD’s Flock data, Thody acknowledged that it is possible: for instance, a Texas police department could call a Massachusetts police department, which could then pull New Bedford data for Texas.
But Massachusetts police departments are like-minded, he said, and share trust.
“Is there a possibility for abuse through another law enforcement agency? There is. We just have to make sure that we’re mindful of it and we can track who’s looking at our data,” Thody said.
NBPD’s Flock FAQ addresses immigration, writing, “Federal sharing is disabled in our Flock system. Federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), do not have access to New Bedford’s Flock data.”
Further, NBPD’s memorandum of understanding, which officers must sign in order to use Flock, says the department “does not permit the sharing of LPR data gathered by the town or its contractors/subcontractors for purpose of federal immigration enforcement, these federal immigration agencies include Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CPB).”
In January, Ofc. William Mouyos entered “immigration (civil/administrative)” in the search reason field. It’s unclear if a case number was redacted from that cell.
Mouyos is routinely in the top 10 of officers with the most Flock searches this year. He worked in a unit tasked with clamping down on scooters and the crimes tied to them, including shootings.
The Light previously reported that Mouyos faced a 15-day suspension for excessive force and failing to activate his body camera during a scooter chase last year that ended in him punching a juvenile.
The Light contacted Mouyos and NBPD on Monday for comment about his immigration search in the Flock system.
According to Thody, and critics of Flock, it’s insufficient for officers to only write “investigation” as the reason for their search. It’s too vague, critics say, and makes accountability and oversight challenging.
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In order to search, officers don’t need to reach the legal threshold of reasonable suspicion or probable cause. It just needs to be related to an NBPD investigation.
A lot of the listed search reasons mention weapons, drugs, assault, stolen property and traffic infractions. The policy and internal use agreement also dictates that officers “memorialize” their search “by a case number, call for service, or report number” in the “search reason” field. But in 2025, officers were frequently entering only “investigation” or abbreviations of it: “invest,” “inv” and “inves.”
Other reasons entered in 2025 include “Emily said to,” “Cuba,” “I” (or a lowercase l), “ATF Invest,” “DEA Invest,” “erratic,” “unauthorized use,” “suss white volvo,” “hot,” “Incestigation,” “rocks,” and “Social Media Inquiry.”
The city seemingly withheld the “filter” column in the organization audit data released to The Light this week. That information was shared with ACLUM last year, and it shows what type of vehicles the officers searched.
In response to a public records request for all versions of a contract the city has entered into with Flock, the city provided one unsigned document with 2026 in its file name; the city has used Flock since 2024.
The city’s Master Services Agreement with Flock says that the customer (New Bedford) “grants to Flock a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services; and (b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock’s products and services.”
In the agreement, Flock also protects itself from liability if something happens.
As for the placement of cameras, Flock advises on the “location and positioning of the Flock Hardware for optimal product functionality” and has “final discretion to veto a specific location.”
Should any disputes arise between Flock and the city, the agreement mandates that the city’s options, such as arbitration, “shall be governed exclusively by, and construed and enforced in accordance with, the laws of the State of Georgia.” Flock is based in Georgia.
Gideon Epstein, policy counsel at ACLU of Massachusetts, said at least 80 police departments in the state are using Flock license plate readers, but that at least five communities have decided to cut ties with Flock, including Cambridge and Salem.
Epstein, who will also speak at the meeting on Tuesday, said Massachusetts lacks legal guardrails that other New England states have adopted. License plate reader technology in general can be effective in certain circumstances, he said, but it needs to be regulated and used responsibly. ACLUM has raised specific concerns about Flock as a vendor.
Thody said Flock has been a “good vendor” to deal with and has a team willing to answer questions, including from the media.
The Light contacted Flock last week with questions on the timing of the camera installations in New Bedford, the data-sharing settings and availability for a call with a Flock representative.
“Please reach out to the New Bedford Police Department. Flock does not share specifics regarding individual agency contracts, camera counts, locations, or deployments,” wrote Paris Lewbel, public relations manager for Flock, in an email. “In general for your reporting: Customers control their own sharing settings through the Flock platform. These sharing relationships are opt-in and can be changed or revoked by the agency at any time.”
Lewbel did not respond to a follow-up question.
The meeting on the city’s use of Flock cameras is on Tuesday, July 28, at 6 p.m., Pulaski Elementary School, 1097 Braley Road.
Email Anastasia E. Lennon at alennon@newbedfordlight.org.
