Flock has been touting a recent study on how its cameras affect car theft. Yet the paper fails to establish a causal link.
Are Flock cameras truly reducing crime? A fresh analysis by the Institute for Justice questions Flock Safety’s assertions that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) meaningfully cut vehicle theft and raise clearance rates.
Flock Safety has been publicizing a working paper that investigates whether the company’s controversial cameras improve outcomes in motor vehicle theft. To assess the impact of Flock’s surveillance network, the study analyzes data from 216 agencies that began using Flock between 2017 and 2023, contrasted with 3,108 agencies that did not. The researchers then evaluated the cameras’ effects on monthly motor vehicle thefts, theft-related arrest rates, and the recovery time of stolen cars after ALPR deployment.
The study reports an 11 percent decrease in motor vehicle theft, a 15.9 percent uptick in motor vehicle theft arrests, and a 0.28‑day shorter median recovery time for some recovered vehicles. The authors stated that ‘fixed ALPR deployment is associated with lower theft and higher [arrests], alongside a modest reduction in recovery lag among recorded recoveries.’
However, the data aren’t as clear as they appear, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian law firm and home of the Plate Privacy Project.
IJ Senior Researcher Analyst Matthew West found that theft and arrest trends in those jurisdictions were already moving in the favored direction months before Flock’s cameras were installed. Not surprisingly, many communities that chose to deploy ALPR systems did so amid high levels of vehicle theft and pursued crime-fighting efforts beyond partnering with Flock. Because the study does not compare places on similar trajectories, it remains unclear how much credit the cameras, as opposed to those other initiatives, deserve for causing thefts to fall and arrests to rise.
“Because there were already differences in arrests and thefts trends before ALPR deployment, we don’t know if the differences in ALPR deployment were caused by ALPR deployment,” West explained in a statement.
West notes that the authors observed an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft only “when the data are weighted in favor of agencies that had a bigger problem to begin with.” By contrast, if “the data are instead averaged across all agencies (or weighted by population), the study finds no statistically significant change” in theft numbers.
The study’s data also come with other complications that the authors did not fully account for. One is the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which affected both crime levels and the number of people driving across the country. Another is the viral ‘Kia Challenge’ on social media, which led to increased Kia and Hyundai thefts. Such “events may have contributed to motor vehicle theft rising and falling at different times in different places,” writes West, further complicating whether ALPR cameras did, in fact, cause favorable changes in the data.
These criticisms don’t automatically mean the study’s results are wrong, but they indicate that the full picture hasn’t been explored.
Flock has been leveraging the working paper’s results to defend its cameras amid an ongoing national backlash. Yet, despite the company’s wishes, the scrutiny of ALPR surveillance technology is far from over.
