Boston Globe Opinion Editor on Flock's Value for Community Safety

What timing: Days after Cambridge cancelled its contract with the license-plate reader company Flock over privacy concerns, the firm’s devices helped solve one of the region’s highest-profile murders in years.

Police tracked down the man believed to have killed two Brown students in Rhode Island, and an MIT professor in Brookline, with the aid of the cameras, which capture license plate numbers and other identifying information from passing cars.

It’s not the first major crime the cameras have helped solve in New England, MassLive reported; they also helped police solve murders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

Still, left-leaning jurisdictions have turned against Flock cameras lately, concerned that the data they generate could be used by immigration authorities to find immigrants living in the country without authorization.

We’re all pretty lucky, though, that other cities in Massachusetts haven’t followed Cambridge’s lead, or else a serial killer might still be on the loose.

The man, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, had rented a Nissan Sentra with a Florida plate. Flock data helped investigators track the vehicle, and the killer; he killed himself last week at a self-storage facility in New Hampshire before officers closed in on the site.

It’s an awkward outcome for activists leading the charge against the company.

“We are all breathing a sigh of relief that law enforcement officers were able to locate the alleged shooter using the tools available to them,” Rebecca Winter, the executive director of Mass 50501, told a Globe reporter. “However, when those same tools can be used — without guardrails — to serve the unjust and illegal purposes of a fascist government, it’s another story.”

Here’s the thing, though. Aggressive immigration enforcement may well be unjust and unwise — I wrote as much in this newsletter last week — but it’s not generally illegal. ICE can lawfully detain and deport foreign nationals if they are living in the country illegally.

So guardrails or no, it’s hard for me to believe that municipalities could actually prevent immigration authorities from accessing their Flock data if the feds really wanted it badly enough.

Ultimately, I suspect the only foolproof way for cities to prevent their camera data from helping ICE is to not have any cameras in the first place — and accept that as a result, police will have one fewer tool to do their job when there’s a car theft, a missing person, or a killer on the run.

Is that a tradeoff cities want to make?

There’s a broader argument, of course, that we trade too much privacy for security overall, and that embracing Flock cameras is just another step down the slippery slope to a surveillance state.

But at least to me, license plate readers are a much less threatening form of government surveillance than, say, facial recognition software and cameras that scan crowds of people.

That’s for the basic reason that when you choose to drive a car, you are submitting to more government scrutiny and giving up some anonymity. That’s always been part of the deal. The whole reason the license plate is there in the first place is that drivers are not supposed to be anonymous and untraceable.

We don’t walk around with our government ID numbers showing on the outside. But we do drive that way, and have for a century.

And if we commit a crime and then drive away in a car with our identifying information on it — well, it’s hard to blame jurisdictions that want to take a picture.

This op-ed was authored by Alan Wirzbicki, the Boston Globe deputy editor for editorials, and published in the Globe on Dec. 22, 2025.