Foss Park District Board Rejects Flock Camera Proposal in 4–1 Vote

NORTH CHICAGO, Ill. — The Foss Park District Board voted 4–1 Thursday night against a proposal to install a Flock Safety camera at Foss Park & Beach, rejecting the surveillance technology amid growing concerns over privacy, data access and potential misuse of automated license plate readers.

The decision comes as Flock Safety and similar automated license plate recognition systems face increased scrutiny nationwide. The cameras capture vehicle information, including license plates, and allow authorized users to search collected data as part of criminal investigations.

Supporters of the technology have argued that license plate readers can provide law enforcement with another tool for identifying stolen vehicles, locating suspects and assisting with missing-person investigations. But critics have increasingly questioned how information collected by the cameras is stored, accessed and shared — and whether sufficient safeguards exist to prevent improper searches.

Those concerns are not entirely hypothetical.

In Kenosha County, Wisconsin, an internal investigation found that a sheriff’s deputy improperly used Flock to search for the vehicle of another deputy with whom he had been romantically involved. Investigators determined the searches were unrelated to a legitimate law-enforcement investigation. The allegations of unauthorized Flock use and other misconduct were sustained.

Illinois communities have also confronted questions surrounding the technology. In Mount Prospect, officials disclosed in 2025 that outside law-enforcement agencies had conducted 262 immigration-related searches involving the village’s Flock data. Mount Prospect police said they were unaware of those searches until an Illinois Secretary of State investigation brought them to the department’s attention. The village subsequently opted out of Flock’s National Lookup feature, revoked access for agencies outside Illinois and announced plans for regular audits.

Reports of alleged personal misuse have surfaced elsewhere as well. A nationwide review by the Institute for Justice documented numerous cases in which officers were accused of using automated license plate reader systems to track romantic partners, former partners or other individuals for reasons unrelated to legitimate police work. One reported Illinois case involved a Matteson officer accused of conducting hundreds of searches involving a former domestic partner and that person’s new partner.

The controversy has intensified this month. An investigation by The Washington Post found at least 50 law-enforcement officers had been charged with or accused of misusing license plate reader systems, with Flock technology involved in 46 of the cases reviewed.

Flock Safety has responded to mounting criticism by announcing additional safeguards. The company says agencies will be required to use auditing tools designed to identify suspicious searches, searches will be tied more closely to case numbers, and its default data-retention period will be reduced from 30 days to seven. Flock maintains that its technology remains an important public-safety tool and that misuse represents a small fraction of its overall use.

The debate surrounding the proposed Foss Park camera therefore extended beyond whether surveillance technology can help solve crimes. It raised broader questions about who controls collected information, who can search it, how long records should remain available and under what circumstances information can be shared beyond the agency or community that collected it.

Residents can support public safety while still questioning the expansion of surveillance technology. Opposition to a camera system does not inherently indicate opposition to law enforcement, nor should residents raising privacy concerns be characterized as criminals or threats.

Thursday night’s 4–1 vote ultimately keeps a Flock camera out of Foss Park & Beach — at least for now — and places the Foss Park District among communities wrestling with where to draw the line between new public-safety technology and the privacy rights of the people it is intended to protect.

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