Last updated on July 20, 2022
Since August of 2021, when three municipalities in Rhode Island – Cranston, Pawtucket, and Woonsocket – began secretly instituting a broad network of expansive surveillance technology, owned and operated by the company Flock Safety, the ACLU of RI has been engaged in efforts to both halt the implementation of this technology and to urge municipalities and state leaders to put in place meaningful restrictions on the future consideration of any surveillance.
Expansiveness of the Technology
As typically occurs with surveillance technology, the actual capabilities of these cameras have been severely underplayed by police representatives over the past few months. The joint release issued by the police departments of Cranston, Woonsocket, and Pawtucket in August 2021 illustrated this issue, with the release reducing the abilities of the Flock Safety cameras to simply say that they “capture still photographs of license plates and vehicle characteristics as they travel on public roads.” It is true that these cameras record and store both of these aspects, but the realities of the expanded abilities of this technology are far more alarming and troubling:
Racial Discrimination & First Amendment Rights
Finally, separating the history of surveillance in the United States from racial discrimination is impossible because they are inextricably bound. Communities of color have disproportionately experienced the egregious effects of limitless surveillance, and this is not purely an historical lesson. In the last two years, First Amendment rights and racial discrimination have been entwined with the expanded use of surveillance tools. For example, municipal law departments were found to have used surveillance camera footage to inappropriately monitor activists during the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. In short, the abuse of surveillance technology is not hypothetical. Given the swath of current capabilities that Flock Safety advertises – and the ones which it could add in the future – we are extremely concerned that this technology could facilitate similar police activity in Rhode Island.
This campaign covers the many strategies that our affiliate has undertaken to halt the use of this technology. We urge all Rhode Islanders to contact their state legislators and municipal officials and similarly ask them to curb expansive surveillance in the Ocean State.