Livingston County sheriff temporarily removes Flock cameras after repeated vandalism

Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy said that the county has temporarily removed all of its Flock cameras — the controversial automatic license plate readers that have stirred bipartisan pushback across Michigan and the country — in the wake of a repeated string of vandalism incidents targeting the cameras. 

“We took them down just to avoid any more vandalism,” he said. “Frankly, we’re trying to figure out how we can best protect our investment, and how we can hold those accountable that do the vandalism because it’s a felony. You can voice opposition against something all you want, but destroying property’s not the way to do it.”

He said that the county does not have a timeline for when they will put the cameras back up, but that they do intend to return the devices to operation once the sheriff’s office has determined how best to prevent future vandalism.

The county had about 25 cameras active prior to their temporary removal, Murphy said. 

But while Livingston County plans to maintain a Flock presence, jurisdictions around the state — from Menominee in the far western part of the Upper Peninsula to Westland in the Detroit suburbs — have canceled or rejected contracts with Flock entirely in recent months. Most recently, on Tuesday night, Monroe County voted to end its Flock program. 

Murphy defended the use of Flock cameras as an investigative tool — emphasizing that, while some believe that the cameras have capabilities like facial recognition, all the cameras can actually do is take a photo of the license plate. The argument of the investigative importance of the cameras has been cited by other police departments around the state in defending their own contracts with Flock. 

Murphy also emphasized that in today’s “data-driven society,” technology including cell phones and even vehicles also collect extensive amounts of personal information — so he does not understand the specific pushback against Flock. 

“If you’re that worried about your privacy, instead of not going by a camera location, you’re gonna go out there and destroy it,” he said. “That, to me, doesn’t make any sense. But that’s where we’re at as a society today, unfortunately.”

Grassroots groups in the county have expressed opposition to the cameras — Stand Against Extremism LivCo launched a petition to remove Flock cameras from Livingston County permanently.  

“We don’t want to give the federal government tools that can surveil our community,” the petition reads as among the group’s reasons for the cameras’ removal. “Police nationwide can search the same database, this has already been abused for unrelated investigations.”

Among the group’s concerns are a lack of public oversight on the management of the data collected, as well as the amount of taxpayer dollars being spent on the cameras.