On an early fall afternoon in 2023, Noel Pichardo, a 28-year-old Rhode Island police officer five years into the job, noticed a compact, solar-powered camera perched on a utility pole over West Avenue in Pawtucket's District Five, according to WIRED. The camera was angled down toward passing traffic — and it looked like the Flock Safety surveillance hardware he had been shown two years earlier. WIRED reported that Flock markets its platform as the nation's largest fixed license-plate-reader network, processing billions of sightings each month, and that a camera installed by one municipality can become searchable by investigators hundreds or thousands of miles away once departments share records.
How Flock's license plate readers work
At a 2021 presentation inside a Pawtucket police substation, a high-ranking official described how Flock's automatic license plate readers identify vehicles not just by license plate but by bumper stickers, roof racks, and other distinguishing features, according to WIRED. Investigators could search for a particular car across jurisdictions and, camera by camera, reconstruct where the vehicle had been. Pichardo's concern, WIRED reported, was that in a medium-size city where a handful of roads carry people nearly everywhere they need to go, a record of a car's movements amounts to a record of a person's life — the places visited, the people seen, the routines followed.
That first Flock proposal went nowhere — Pawtucket could not afford a permanent installation, Pichardo believed.
A 60-day pilot and a privacy backlash
In 2021, Flock offered Pawtucket police a free 60-day pilot, and 17 cameras went up around the city as part of a regional test that also included Cranston and Woonsocket, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The rollout quickly drew criticism: the ACLU of Rhode Island accused the department of installing the cameras surreptitiously after the pilot began without prior public input or notice to the city council. Pawtucket chief of police Tina Goncalves later apologized, saying the department would "work better in the future" to communicate with the city council, WIRED reported. The pilot ended that year, and in May 2023 local TV news reported Pawtucket was not moving forward with the installation. Pichardo believed the idea was a dead letter.
A $128,000 deployment, discovered on the street
In September 2023, records show, Pawtucket moved forward with a two-year deployment worth $128,000, according to WIRED. The city planned to install 20 cameras along many of its busiest roads, including:
- Newport Avenue
- Main Street
- Broadway
- Smithfield Avenue
- West Avenue — where Pichardo first noticed one hanging over the road
"Wait a minute," Pichardo recalled thinking. "When did we make this decision to put these up?"
Within months, Pichardo's questions would set off a chain of events that, he says, ended his career in law enforcement.
| Flock platform attribute | Detail from WIRED |
|---|---|
| Vendor | Flock Safety |
| Technology | Automatic license plate readers (fixed network) |
| Market position | "Nation's largest fixed license-plate-reader network" |
| Volume | Billions of sightings per month |
| Identification data | License plates, bumper stickers, roof racks |
| Cross-agency sharing | Records can be opened to other agencies |
| Pawtucket contract | $128,000 over two years, 20 cameras |
| Previous pilot | Free 60-day trial, 17 cameras in a regional test |
The Pawtucket deployment is one small piece of a sprawling vehicle-surveillance system that touches nearly every state in the country, according to WIRED. For Pichardo, the camera over West Avenue ended the assumption that the Flock proposal had died: the same hardware he had seen in a 2021 PowerPoint was now live on city streets, and his questions about the decision triggered a chain of events that, he says, ended his law-enforcement career.
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