Today, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors discussed the police department’s use of Flock’s automated license plate reader cameras — or ALPRs for short — during its Safety and Security Committee meeting.

While the board did not official action today, Supervisor Alcorn made the following statement at the meeting:

Alcorn's Flock Statement

The development and implementation of new AI tools raises concerns about automated license plate readers to a whole new level. And, we are using a vendor that has somehow united the right and the left against them, including Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Bernie Sanders!  

As the local governing body for more than a million residents, we should be extra careful to avoid enabling a surveillance state and inadvertently enabling harm to others — not through our own actions but through others misuse of the data we collect. With this vendor, the data are not encrypted, and the data are not managed on a private or closed network. I am not convinced that others are not misusing our data. 

If I were voting today, I would vote to end the contract for ALPR cameras with that vendor.

But in my view, there is an even bigger issue than one controversial vendor. We need a broader community discussion about the goals, best practices, and the limits of digital law enforcement in the AI Age, and in the upcoming quantum computing age. And that discussion needs to include not only the lawyers and the police officials but also IT and data specialists, civil liberties advocates, owners of privately purchased cameras, others that care, and members of the public at large. This discussion should start in Fairfax County, but it needs to be a regional discussion because stolen cars and missing persons don’t stop at county borders. We do have a long history of regional cooperation through the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments on several law enforcement issues, including most visibly the regional mutual-aid agreements. So maybe that’s a regional variation on the option for a closed network ALPR system that should be looked at as part of a broader community discussion of digital law enforcement in the AI Age.

At the committee meeting, the police presented their three possible options for the ALPR program:

Option 1: Maintain the current program while continuing to evaluate other vendors and data sharing practices

Option 2 – Maintain the current ALPR program while testing and evaluating other ALPR vendors who can maintain compliance with 2.2-5517 and FCPD General Order 424.

Option 3 - Become a closed network ALPR system with no data sharing outside Fairfax County while maintaining access to privately owned ALPR cameras. Evaluate the closed network option in one year.