Cambridge and Somerville and Boston, as a result of prior work by Digital Fourth, ACLU of MA and others, have “surveillance oversight ordinances” that put procedural hurdles in the way of police adoption of surveillance technologies.
Under these ordinances, for something like Flock Safety, city agencies are legally obliged to disclose to City Council that they are intending to deploy any surveillance technology. They must explain what the technology is; what will happen to the data from it (collection, retention, sharing, destruction); and whether they believe it will have a differential impact on any group within the City. That report must be presented at a public hearing, and the City Council is empowered to say yes or no to the technology.
In the context of this ordinance in Cambridge, unfortunately, a lot depends on who chairs the Public Safety Committee, and how close they are to the cops. We made very little headway in blocking surveillance technologies from January 2023 through to the summer of 2024, because the chair of Public Safety, Paul Toner, was the most powerful Councilor and was very tight with the cops. He waved through anything they asked for. He was very reluctant to schedule separate public hearings for new technologies. In February 2025, therefore, he made sure that Flock would be approved, and the three City Councilors with genuine concerns (including DSA-endorsed Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler), weren’t able to prevail. We brought six people to give public testimony against it.
At the same time, we were fighting the City on a proposal to allow Cambridge PD to deploy drones. We worked closely with ACLU of MA, and Councilors were worried enough that Toner had to schedule a hearing. At the hearing, we focused on the fact that Cambridge PD hadn’t bothered to develop or disclose a policy on drone use, so whatever they were saying about how drones would or would not be used wasn’t binding. We recommended that Cambridge PD go and draft a policy, consult with us and with ACLU, and bring the policy back to City Council, whereupon City Council would consider whether the proposal to deploy drones was reasonable. Remarkably, City Council agreed, against Toner’s objections. It was a sign of things to come. Over a year later, Cambridge PD has not moved forward with that proposal.
In May through to June, things began to shift regarding Flock. Our national folks monitor surveillance, privacy and Fourth Amendment news very closely. The news broke that Flock had helped a Texas cop chase down a woman suspected of having an abortion. Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler, responding to that news, filed a policy order for reconsideration of the Flock deployment, backed up by Nolan and Siddiqui. Because we were monitoring the agendas for City meetings in general, we saw that the Pole and Conduit Commission was proposing to approve the actual installation of Flock equipment. We saw an opening, and mobilized to get the Pole and Conduit Commission to delay approval of actual installation till after City Council had considered Sobrinho-Wheeler’s policy order.
Flock had to disclose to that Commission the exact locations where they planned to put in the cameras. That gave our advocacy lots of ammunition. Bad news kept flooding in for Flock Safety, and we made sure City Councilors, the City Manager and the Pole and Conduit Commission members had that information. Then, on July 8, a scandal that had been circulating around City Hall for around a year broke, and Paul Toner announced his future resignation, and was stripped of his committee chairmanships. Toner was replaced as chair of Public Safety by his vice-Chair Angie Wilson. She scheduled consideration of Sobrinho-Wheeler’s policy order for September. We organized speakers for that session. Toner still strenuously objected to revoking Flock’s contract, so it was agreed to suspend it, pending a review by the City Manager. We submitted for this hearing a thorough analysis of where the cameras were to be deployed, because Flock had had to disclose to the Pole and Conduit Commission exactly where they were planning to put them up; we made the argument that the ALPR cameras were heavily focused on East Cambridge in a way that would deeply and differentially affect the residents of public housing complexes in that area.
The review returned to the Council on December 9, and Wilson invited Gideon Epstein of ACLU of MA and Alex Marthews of Digital Fourth to provide expert testimony, like we had done in 2018-21 under Toner’s predecessor. Then, unexpectedly, at the start of the meeting, Cambridge PD and the City Manager’s office recommended revocation of the Flock contract. They had just found out that morning that Flock Safety was in breach of the contract terms. The City had suspended the contract and made very clear that no equipment was to be installed, but a Flock technician had gone ahead and reinstalled two cameras anyway. What with that, and our and ACLU’s expert testimony, and nine out of ten public testimonies being thoroughly opposed to Flock, the writing was finally on the wall. Public Safety Committee recommended revocation, and given the City Manager’s and the police’s posture, it was a given that the full Council would wave through the revocation.
The City Council still preserved, and the City Manager is even now trying to preserve, the underlying City approval for the use of ALPR in general, but now without a specific vendor in mind, and therefore without any specifics on where it would deploy or what the policies would be. The onus is now on the City/Cambridge PD to identify an ALPR vendor that won’t pose significant privacy issues.