Winthrop and its police force remain committed to using Flock monitoring cameras around town, even as they are being abandoned elsewhere due to privacy concerns, but will take new steps to guard against potential abuses.

Winthrop police operate about two dozen cameras in public parts of town, with about a half-dozen operated by the controversial Flock Safety company, and the department considers them essential and cost-saving tools.

The Flock cameras read the license plates of all passing cars, and complaints about them have been rising amid rapid system expansion, allegations of officers tracking personal targets, fears of the cameras aiding overly aggressive federal immigration sweeps, and questions of Flock pursuing wider private uses.

Widespread use

Winthrop is not alone in using such cameras. Most cities and towns in Massachusetts have automated license plate reader cameras, and Flock works with about 80 of them, according to private tallies. Winthrop is part of a nine-community coalition centered on Boston that began adding them in recent years to their utility poles.

But the growing concerns over Flock have led several communities in the state – including Cambridge, Framingham, Salem, New Bedford, Natick, Watertown and at least eight others – to drop them in the past year.

The concerns and complaints about the cameras are being taken seriously, Winthrop’s police chief, John Goodwin, said in an interview. As part of the department’s response, Mr Goodwin said, the Winthrop police are adding guardrails that include new training for officers in the use of such systems, and quarterly internal assessments of practices.

“We’re responding to the criticism, because we don’t want the community to ever lose confidence in us,” Mr Goodwin said.

Value assessment

But the department does not plan to stop using such cameras, because they have proven so valuable, Mr Goodwin said. The police chief cited a series of instances where the use of such cameras in a coordinated fashion have been critical to solving and prosecuting crimes, including a murder case where the suspect was tracked from the South Shore to the North Shore, and a rash of convenience store robberies in the Boston area that ended with cameras tying the suspect to an incident at the D&T Market in Winthrop.

The technology is especially useful in a town such as Winthrop, Mr Goodwin said, because its geography with only two roadway entry points means that all vehicle traffic can be tallied with very few cameras. The system works on a rental basis that costs the town only about $10,000 a year, which is far below the cost of tracking vehicles with manual labor, he said.

“If I didn’t have Flocks, I would have to spend endless hours on surveillance – endless and endless and endless – and it costs money,” he said.

The plate-reading capability of cameras provided by Flock is part of a long-term technological evolution, that has included cell phones and GPS technologies, in which law enforcement battles in the courts with civil-rights advocates such as the ACLU, and the police obey the limits of what judges allow, Mr Goodwin said. That will continue to happen here, he said.

Mounting complaints

A future development for Winthrop, already used by police in communities that include Revere, could be the use of drone-based monitoring, Mr Goodwin said. That might be useful for jobs that include water rescues, firefighting, and searches in marshes, though Winthrop may find implementation difficult due to the proximity of the airport, he said.

A particularly nearby example of suspected abuses with Flock includes the situation in Lynn, where two police officers were placed on leave after an audit detected a “concerning pattern” in their searches of Flock data. Details were not released publicly in that case, though police in Stow took steps to fire and criminally charge one officer, and New Bedford police placed an officer on leave, after both were accused of using the system to stalk former girlfriends.

The Flock cameras record the license plates and other details of all passing vehicles including make, model, color and even bumper stickers. Flock also has pursued the idea of using Uber and Lyft vehicles to scan the license plates of passing vehicles.

Nationwide, The Washington Post said it has counted more than 50 cases of officer misuse of Flock cameras, in situations that include stalking and harassment. Los Angeles police declined to renew their Flock contract after finding that more than a third of the stolen-vehicle alerts it produced were false. And in one case in Georgia, Flock sales agents demonstrating their product to local police showed their ability to view children at a local community center.

Political support

The president of Winthrop’s Town Council, Jim Letterie, backed the chief’s perspective. “I think they provide an incredible service,” Mr Letterie said of the cameras on the WCAT program Winthrop and the World. “I believe that if there was one, God forbid, child abducted, or any incident, something like that, and we were able to get a good lead or solve that case because of that camera, I believe it’s worth any inconvenience it might cause.”

Mr Letterie said he didn’t see the need for a Town Council debate over the question, though he said it could be useful for the police and other town officials to give the council updates on the program and the value of it.

Lee Meyer, the Democratic party challenger for the state representative seat for Winthrop, gave a more mixed assessment. In his own appearance on the WCAT program, Mr Meyer said he believes the technology has great potential for fighting crime, but also carries the possibility of downsides that require strong regular monitoring.

“It’s something that we have to have a debate about, for sure,” Mr Meyer said.