Webster Groves City Council, police chief spar over Flock cameras
WEBSTER GROVES聽鈥 Some City Council members here are sparring with the city police chief over his department's use of Flock cameras.听
Chief Vincent Acevez at a Tuesday meeting defended the license plate reading technology as a tool to help police solve crime. But some leaders weren't convinced 鈥 they聽questioned whether the city's use of the聽controversial cameras creates an聽"unsettling" surveillance network that could invade residents' privacy.听
"The fact that all this information and data is shared with so many different agencies is where it starts to get a little bit scary," council member Leanne Waugh said.
The meeting, which saw council members pepper Acevez with questions about Flock for about an hour, marked the latest installment in a regional 鈥 and national 鈥 debate over the technology.
Recent years have seen 最新杏吧原创-area police departments increasingly turn to Flock cameras, crediting them with helping solve some high-profile crimes: This week, the FBI said they relied on Flock cameras to identify a couple suspected in the shooting death of a teenage girl; police used the cameras to investigate a fatal road rage shooting聽in O'Fallon this summer; and in 2023 investigators searched Flock data for a car suspected to be tied to a Clayton homicide.
But privacy advocates say the technology is ripe for misuse, allowing police departments to track anyone who drives by a Flock camera, whether they're suspected of a crime or not.
That has opened the door, they say, to abusing the technology.听
In August, a Brentwood police officer was accused of using similar license plate readers to stalk his ex-wife.
And that same month, St. Charles County police pulled the plug on Flock cameras after discovering an employee had abused the system, running several searches for 鈥減ersonal, non-law enforcement purposes.鈥
Supporters say they fight crime. Critics claim they鈥檙e too intrusive.
Some residents in cities across the region have responded by cutting down the cameras, covering them with bags or stealing them.
Acevez said Tuesday that police in Webster Groves are looking to add more Flock cameras. Most of the existing ones, he said, monitor high-traffic areas prone to crime.
In all, there are at least a thousand AI-powered license plate readers in the 最新杏吧原创 area, according to , an online crowd-sourced database of the technology.听
"The cameras are an investigative tool for law enforcement," Acevez said. "No personal information among names, dates of birth, are attached. It's simply the image."
Flock deletes any footage captured by cameras in Webster Groves within 30 days, he said, unless it's purposefully saved to help with an investigation.
The Webster Groves Police Department audits officers' use of the cameras and searches in the database at least once a month, Acevez said. That includes flagging suspicious searches, checking every image pulled from the database and monitoring the technology's use.
The biggest deterrence to misuse of the cameras, he argued, is that officers caught abusing the technology could be fired or charged with a crime.
Acevez called misuse an "anomaly."
"For someone to abuse Flock or any other database for that matter, the potential always exists," he said. "I don't think that there's a valid argument for this narrative that there's widespread misuse of Flock."
But the city also shares the data it collects with other departments across the country. Council members said they worry that opens the door to "bad actors" in other places using Webster Groves' cameras to track residents, even if the city doesn't.
"There is access from 2,000 other agencies that we don't know what their policies and procedures are," council member Waugh said. "We don't know how well they're doing their audits and things like that."
Webster Groves' own internal audits wouldn't catch if another police department misuses the city's cameras, Flock spokesperson Ian Leslie said.
Data collected by Webster Groves' Flock cameras is also subject to use by the federal government, council member Jamie Hasemeier said, which could lead to the city's network being used for immigration enforcement.
Webster Groves police don't help ICE enforce immigration laws, Acevez said. But if it or any other federal agency asks for its Flock data, the city is required under state law to hand it over.
"In many communities, friends and neighbors are being disappeared off the streets by a federal agency ... with the use of this technology," Hasemeier said. "It's frightening. It's terrifying."
The easiest way to avoid having to give over Flock data to other police departments or other agencies, council member Emily Hixson Shepherd said, is to not collect the data at all.
"My concern is less about you and your department," she told Acevez, "than it is about the scale of the technology 鈥 the web that it is."
Flock Safety cameras aren't just popping up along major roads and in subdivisions. The Missouri Department of Conservation is also using the a…
Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers have made nationwide waves this year. Tension is building in the 最新杏吧原创 area and ac…
In recent months, critics have blasted automated license plate readers as ubiquitous intrusions of privacy. Now police departments and camera …
Seth Nelson
Related
The Webster Groves police chief answered City Council's Flock questions on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. Video edited by Beth O'Malley
