Concerning Boulder Police’s Adoption of Flock Cameras and Encrypted Radios
The Boulder Police Department’s adoption of Flock Safety cameras and encryption of radio communications are incompatible with Boulder’s values of transparency, accountability, and civil rights. Rather than improving public safety, these tools instead erode civil liberties and undermine public trust in policing.
Automated licensed plate readers (ALPRs) like Flock cameras indiscriminately scan and record every vehicle’s movements and store them in a mass surveillance database. ALPRs are antithetical to our constitutional rights to privacy and presumption of innocence. Originally justified to track serious crimes, these tools have predictably expanded into tracking minor crimes and marginalized groups like immigrants, people of color, and people seeking reproductive healthcare. We join other civil rights groups including the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Institute for Justice, and Brennan Center to demand law enforcement agencies cease using these intrusive surveillance technologies within Boulder.
While BPD says it only shares data with other Colorado law enforcement agencies, there is no public oversight of how inter-agency data requests are handled. Law enforcement agencies do not need warrants to query these systems. There is nothing stopping out-of-control federal agencies like ICE from accessing these data. BPD’s assurances that “out-of-state agencies can no longer search our system” through “supervisor-approved audit trails” are hollow. What are common reasons officers elsewhere provided in these audit trails? “Info” and “susp”. Out-of-state and federal agencies only need to find a Colorado agency willing to collaborate with them in order to access the troves of data about Boulder residents.
Flock’s business model relies on expanding this surveillance infrastructure and combining it with other data to allow analysts to reconstruct movement patterns that reveal sensitive information about individuals' political, religious, and health-related activities. Flock announced earlier this month that it is partnering with Amazon to ingest data from Ring doorbell cameras. There are already documented cases elsewhere using Flock to stalk individuals, to investigate out-of-state abortions, and leaking data. At a time when Boulder prides itself as being a stronghold of democracy in an increasingly unsafe nation, it is alarming that BPD would continue to rely on technology that actively threatens our residents’ safety and lacks basic oversight.
Just as BPD adopts one technology undermining constitutional protections for residents, it is also adopting another technology that undercuts transparency into its operations: encrypted police radios. Journalists, watchdogs, and the public have used radio scanners for decades to monitor public safety activity in real time and are a vital line of public accountability. This access has uncovered misconduct, improved emergency response, and ensured that official narratives could be independently verified. Access to police communications have also ensured that members of the public who are concerned about crime have easy access to real-time information without filtering through complex records requests weeks later.
When police in Denver, Aurora, and Pueblo shifted to encrypted radios, they also failed to follow through with implementing a legislatively-mandated “communications access policy.” These policies are supposed to provide local media access to radios but police departments have been insisting on indemnification clauses that are a prior restraint on journalists’ and other watchdogs’ free speech rights. We join other groups including the NAACP, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Radio Television Digital News Association to demand that BPD immediately implement a communications access policy that grants radio access to local media and other public interest organizations to report on BPD operations without restrictions.
The choices to adopt technologies like license plate readers and encrypted radios represent a troubling trajectory towards greater surveillance of the public and reduced accountability for the police. Instead of investing limited public resources in these technologies, BPD should follow the values outlined in its “Reimagine Policing Plan” and prioritize collaborative problem-solving and holistic governance grounded in its commitments to openness and accountability.
We urge our City Council and the Boulder Police Department to end the use of ALPRs like Flock cameras and to ensure public interest organizations are able to continue monitoring police radio communications. Our community deserves real safety grounded in trust and transparency, not surveillance and secrecy.
Boulder Progressives Board