Did you know that Flock Safety works with over 45 K-12 school districts and universities nationwide to help prevent crime on campus? 

While many schools already have traditional CCTV cameras implemented on their campuses to monitor activity, these cameras tend to be reactive and require someone to sift through footage after an incident occurs. By supplementing these measures with license plate-reading cameras, schools have the ability to prevent offenders from entering campus with real-time alerts gleaned from objective evidence such as license plates. Flock Safety also provides campuses with actionable evidence to solve crimes such as motor vehicle theft, drug trafficking, parking lot break-ins, and more.

Highlights below are from a recent feature in The Exponent on May 31st, 2022. View the full story here.

Two months after Lafayette first installed them, West Lafayette and Purdue University will also add cameras built by Flock Safety, which capture license plates and vehicle characteristics.

The camera system will have the ability to alert police when a license plate is associated with a crime, such as a stolen vehicle or active warrant, or if it is associated with a missing person, according to press releases from both Purdue and West Lafayette police.

Purdue will install six cameras, while West Lafayette will install three.

The WLPD press release noted that the cameras do not use facial recognition and will not be used for traffic enforcement.

"(The data we're capturing is) license plates ... in public areas," Holly Beilin, the leader of public relations at Flock Safety, said Tuesday afternoon. "No faces. No people. We don't use facial recognition, no personally identifiable information."

The data is encrypted in the cloud, and only law enforcement who are the customers have access to that data, Beilin said. "After 30 days, all data not being used in investigations is hard deleted from our servers." 

PUPD Chief John Cox referenced the recent string of BB gun shootings around campus in the press release.

"Incidents involving students being shot by Splat or BB or airsoft guns this past spring semester were difficult to investigate," Cox said. "We often had video from our campuswide digital video system to give us basic vehicle information, but no license plate information could be obtained. 

The Flock system will allow us to search for vehicles based on a video and victim description and obtain a license plate number to use to continue the investigation.”

Purdue is one of roughly two dozen university campuses to install the cameras, and is the first university in Indiana to use them, Beilin said. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is another university that utilizes the cameras. 

"We integrate with national and state databases," Beilin said. "The most common one that people talk about is called the National Crime Information Center. That's an FBI database of all known stolen vehicles and license plates associated with wanted offenders. ... We also integrate with the Amber Alert database, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

"So if a vehicle is detected passing a camera that has a license plate that's on one of those lists, local officers actually get an alert in real-time ... so they can go and apprehend the vehicle either before it gets away (or) before there is any further crime committed."