CUMBERLAND – By a nearly unanimous vote Wednesday evening, the Cumberland Town Council voted to end the town’s contract with Flock Safety to run automated license plate reading cameras near the town’s entry points.
The vote comes almost exactly after a vote by the council to approve a contract with Flock, a decision made at the time with no controversy at the time.
The council Wednesday heard from several people about their ongoing concerns with the cameras before taking their vote.
Councilor Bob Shaw said he was a huge supporter of the cameras until a couple of months ago, when he began researching and learning more. He said it’s not the tool he has a problem with, it’s how the data collected is misused. Shaw saw if this was an internally run and managed system where they could keep the Police Department accountable, that would be one thing, but there is no control over how the data will be misused. If there is a future product that can be managed appropriately, he’ll support that, said Shaw.
Councilor Jodi Harrington-Sweet said she too has done extensive research, reading both articles supporting ALPR cameras and those critical of them, and said that while companies running these cameras aren’t inherently evil, the systems exist to make money. Everyone is told that they’re only cameras, she said, but they’re not, they’re platforms for ever increasing ways to collect data and streamline it to be able to sell it. She said there is a direct conflict of interest for the operators, questioning a reality where information is sold back to the community and the community gives up its freedoms.
Harrington-Sweet said she differs slightly with Shaw in not believing that a locally managed system would be more appropriate. This is little more than a Trojan horse sold as license plate reading technology, she said, calling it a “fine-tuned massive AI data collection system” run by an $8 billion company.
She described scenarios where a system run by either party is trusted with gathering information as personal as someone’s political beliefs found on their bumper stickers, saying there’s no way for anyone to fight back or hold anyone accountable for misuse.
The only way for Flock or any other company to survive and grow is by collecting data, said Harrington-Sweet, and the only way to make it useful is to sell it. What counts as a crime worth chasing down? What constitutes as a valid reason for chasing someone into another state? She called this a “massive mistake,” adding that communities don’t have enough tech literacy to handle it, and she hopes the vote on ALPR cameras will be no “now and forevermore.”
Councilor Tim Magill, who has a background in law enforcement, said he would support use of the cameras because of their usefulness in fighting crime and breaking cases.
Council President Mike Kinch, who has a similar background in policing, said he understands those benefits to law enforcement, but he also votes for the residents he represents, and not one of them in his travels has told him he thinks the town should keep the cameras.
Councilor Peter Bradley said the cameras are a useful tool, but they’re only appropriate if held to the standards originally sold to the council, and it’s become clear that’s not happening.
The vote to end the contract with Flock was 6-1, with Magill opposed.
Our original story Wednesday:
Resolution to terminate Flock camera contract on the docket for Cumberland council
CUMBERLAND – A resolution authorizing Mayor Jeff Mutter to terminate the use of Flock Safety’s license plate-reading cameras in town is on the agenda for the Town Council Wednesday evening, Oct. 7.
The resolution notes that the contract with Flock for the cameras started in September 2024 and was for two years. It also states that council members have received numerous correspondences related to concerns surrounding data retention, storage, and sharing.
The wording on the pending vote is as follows: “Upon review, the town of Cumberland recommends non-renewal and the termination of Flock services.”
Mutter said Wednesday that the topic of a pause or “straight curtailing” has been discussed for some time, and he would be OK with either step.
The mayor said he sees value in the cameras as a tool, but there are certainly questions about them right now. He said he personally doesn’t view a previous incident involving the cameras that led to the misidentification of a suspect and a lawsuit as having much of anything to do with the Flock camera in question, but there are “privacy concerns serious enough to warrant some trepidation and acknowledgement,” he said, and whether those things can be tightened up, that remains to be seen,” he said.
Sitting in his seat, he said he sees the issue from multiple viewpoints. When something bad does happen and seeing what people go through if they’re the ones impacted, having a tool such as cameras to track down a suspect is important and matters, he said.
“You do feel each bad thing,” he said, but he also acknowledges privacy concerns.
“I’ll support it either way,” he said of Wednesday’s vote.
The Cumberland lawsuit over the cameras is what prompted some other communities, including Lincoln, to pause use of the cameras.
According to the lawsuit against the Police Department from Eva Pizzarelli, the arrest came after an officer reportedly saw a car make turns without using a turn signal, and resulted in a short vehicle chase. The police officers then used Facebook to identify someone that they believed was the driver, and a police officer’s report from March 2025 wrongly concluded that “a photo from the flock camera of (the plaintiff) driving the vehicle during the pursuit . . . matches (her) license photo.”
According to the police report in that case from March 26, 2025, Patrolman Jack Halloran states that Sgt. Correia showed him a photo captured from a Flock camera of Eva Pizzarelli driving the vehicle he was chasing during a pursuit near Town Hall.
“The photo matches Pizzarelli’s license photo,” states the report. “In the Flock photo, there also appears to be a male in the passenger seat of the vehicle hiding to make it harder for him to be visible.”
The report then states that probable cause was there to charge Pizzarelli for reckless driving and eluding police and multiple other infractions.
A number of communities have chosen to end their contracts with Flock Safety.
