Flock Safety cameras are getting a lot of credit for helping police find the murderer of two students at Brown University and a MIT professor.
A Reddit post began the hunt for the suspect’s vehicle, a gray Nissan, which police used to search the Flock database. Through information received, law enforcement located the rented car with Florida license plates.
The suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, was found dead at a storage facility in Salem, N.H. Neves Valente died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police.
Flock cameras, for its part, took a victory lap for its part in bringing the case to a close.
“This is why we built Flock Safety — is for moments like this,” Josh Thomas, chief communications officer at Flock, told MassLive. “No one wants this to happen. This is tragic. But a serial killer was caught.”
While instances like this certainly help make the case for installing the cameras, there continues to be vocal opposition to the use of the technology across the nation and in Virginia.
In Charlottesville, City Manager Samuel Sanders Jr. announced this week that its automated license plate reader cameras were being removed. Ten cameras were installed as part of a one-year pilot program that expired in October.
The city had already disconnected from the national sharing network in June due to concerns about data potentially being improperly used for Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.
Despite having one of the most strict policies in the Commonwealth regarding data, City Council members decided to discontinue the program altogether.
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In Staunton, a growing number of citizens continue to push back on the decision of the police department to renew its contract with Flock Safety.
Yard signs and banners opposing the cameras are placed throughout the city, and a petition urging the city to take down the cameras has more than 400 signatures.
In a previous interview with AFP, Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams said the department has no interest in surveilling the citizens of the Queen City but do want to utilize the data to catch criminals after they’ve committed crimes.
At its most recent City Council meeting, 12 people spoke against the six cameras, located on major thoroughfares in the city, though the matter was not on the agenda. One person spoke in favor of the cameras.
During a public comment session at the end of the meeting, the residents urged City Council members to reconsider the use of the cameras which were characterized as “dangerous.”
City residents expressed concerns about the oversight of the data and the potential for the federal government to use information gathered to track and apprehend dissenters.
Deborah Kushner has helped lead the charge against the cameras in Staunton.
At the Dec. 11 meeting, she said the flock cameras, in conjunction with Ring, Echo, air tags, security cameras, smart locks and more, create a surveillance network that can track individuals across 90 percent of the country.
“These are the consistent incursions into our liberties,” Kushner said. “We’ve been warned we are on the slippery slope into authoritarianism. We are there.”
Video: Staunton City Council meeting
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Crystal Graham
