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Flock

Flock Safety is a surveillance company that makes two main categories of product—Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and full-on video cameras. These cameras have the ability to record 24/7 and be placed in a wide range of locations as they are powered by built-in solar panels. Using Flock’s software tools, police can reconstruct a person’s movements often on a minute-to-minute basis. In the case of the video cameras, police can obviously also watch a person’s specific behaviors.

Bloomington had at least 40 ALPRs in November 2025 within City Limits. We know this because the police department in Pittsboro, IN searched them as revealed by a FOIA request. This ability for outside departments to search our data was something that Mayor Kerry Thomson implied was not true for City controlled cameras in Bloomington at a Town Hall in late January 2026. The very next day following the Town Hall, the City recieved an application for permits to install two additional ALPRs and live video cameras. In addition to the cameras operated by Bloomington PD property, there are also at least 6 operated by Monroe County and some unknown number of cameras operated by Indiana University Police Department. Recent reporting states that Bloomington PD only operates 12 cameras which would mean that the university operates 28 or 22 if the counties cameras were labelled as within Bloomington in the FOIA data.

The idea that “Flock is not a surveillance system” as claimed by the Mayor at the aforementioned Town Hall is laughable. If the ability to track a persons every move at a temporal resolution best measured in minutes and a spatial resolution of street intersections isn’t surveillance, than we don’t know what is. Beyond silly claims about what is and is not surveillance, the city has generally been extremely weird about the whole situation. Whether by accident or intent, none of the individual payouts to Flock have been more than $100,000 meaning they are below the threshold at which City Council must approve a transaction. The money was instead paid directly from various accounts including $81,529.68 paid directly from the local income tax “Economic Development” account. Additionally, FOIA requests (technically ARPA requests in Indiana) for the City’s contract with Flock have been repeatedly denied due to supossed terrorism fears from the City.

We know for a fact that ICE has obtained access to Flock data despite not contracting with the company. There is also reporting that police have used Flock searches to track a woman seeking an abortion as well as surveil No Kings protesters. I don’t think that these “crimes” are ones that the people of Bloomington would approve of being investigated in this way—and potentially using data from our town. Additionally, YouTuber Benn Jordan has showed that some of Flock’s video cameras were streaming on the internet without so much as password authentication. We need to get these things the hell out of here ASAP.

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