Concerns grow over Flock cameras across Houston area amid investigations for possible misuse
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Look around you for a moment. There's a very good chance that you're on some camera.
Maybe it's your own camera, maybe it's a camera police are tracking, but either way, you're being recorded.
And questions remain about who is being recorded, what's being recorded, and who has access to it.
"We have them in our homes, we have them in public places, we all have them on our phones," Howard Henderson, the Founding Director for TSU's Center for Justice Research, said. "Society has a right to understand just the extent police have access to video footage in our society."
You've probably noticed Flock Safety cameras around you.
The open-source company DeFlock estimates there are more than 135,000 of them in the country, with more than 2,200 in the Houston area.
Some local law enforcement agencies say the cameras are critical to stopping and tracking crime, but officers don't need warrants to access their data.
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"They create searchable records of people, where they've been, where they've traveled to, and which vehicle has moved near and around them," Henderson said. "That essentially includes people that are not even suspected of a crime, and I think that becomes the bigger issue in this case."
And most of the Flock cameras you see weren't even bought by law enforcement.
The Harris County Sheriff's Office reports it manages a total of 480 cameras. Still, most of the cameras are owned by utility districts and commissioners' offices, so they have their own contracts and share information with authorities without any oversight.
Just this past month, law enforcement officers in Harris County, Fort Bend, Baytown, Pasadena, and Deer Park have been investigated for possibly misusing Flock cameras.
"The question is not whether or not officers have cameras; the question really is whose interests do these cameras really serve and the public's right to accountability," Henderson said. "How many Flock cameras are operating and where? How long is the data being retained? Who can search that data, and is every search being audited?"
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