A cop’s case for Flock

A car is a hard thing to steal, but finding one again is harder. With four million miles of American roads and half of all police departments staffed by fewer than ten officers, eyeballing a licence plate on the highway was a needle in a haystack.

A roadside barcode scanner

Flock is a solar-powered camera bolted to a pole. A car passes, it snaps a photo, reads the plate, checks it against the FBI database, and pings officers in the area if there's a hit. The author, a policeman in the American Southeast, has used it to catch wanted criminals.

The technology is not new. The British Home Office built the first one in 1976; a 2004 trial read five million plates and made over three thousand arrests. In London, the criminals are so scared of it that rappers warn, in their lyrics, not even to smoke weed in your car.

Flock costs three thousand dollars a year, and nearly a third of American police agencies subscribe. It scans cars, not people, and cannot even see who is driving. With it, vehicle-theft clearance rates jumped from 8.2 per cent to 9.5 per cent, and shootings in Atlantic City fell by nearly 40 per cent.

Good Flock, bad Flock

Yet Flock has become America's new moral panic. People have sawn it from poles, smashed it with hammers, rammed it with trucks. More than 150 towns have switched it off. Opponents call it unconstitutional, but the Fourth Amendment only bans unreasonable searches. The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that driving on public roads with a visible licence plate is surrendering any expectation of privacy.

Yes, it can be abused, like looking up an ex-girlfriend's car. But every search must log a reason, data is held for seven days, and officers who misuse it are charged and fired. Critics say we should invade law-abiding lives as little as possible. They are right about that, but wrong about Flock. It lets me be more surgical, and more than anything, it lets me leave you alone.