GROTON — Town officials said in a statement Monday morning Groton will terminate its contract with Flock Safety and “commit to developing a permanent solution” to be presented at the spring Town Meeting next year.
Town Manager Mark Haddad and Police Chief Michael Luth said the town will end its relationship with Flock, the vendor behind the controversial automatic license plate readers, “effective immediately.” The decision comes after a working group went through “several weeks of internal review,” which they said “reflects the Town’s commitment to getting this issue right rather than rushing it.”
“These cameras have been a genuinely valuable tool for our officers, and they have helped us solve real cases and keep our residents safer,” said Luth. “But we’ve also listened carefully to the concerns raised by our community, and we recognize that trust and transparency have to come first. Stepping back now gives us the room to build something better, together.”
According to the statement, the Police Working Camera Group had been working for months to study the technology behind Flock’s ALPR cameras, as well as the “legitimate privacy and oversight concerns raised by residents.” The goal, they said, is for that working group to bring a final recommendation on the issue to the spring 2027 Town Meeting.
“This isn’t a step away from public safety, and it isn’t a step away from supporting our Police Department,” said Haddad. “It’s a decision to slow down, do this right, and come back to Town Meeting with a solution that the community can have real confidence in. I remain a strong supporter of our Police Department and the work they do every day, and this decision is about giving that work the best possible foundation going forward.”
This past summer was marked by heightened scrutiny and backlash toward Flock and its camera systems, which critics have been arguing cross a line when it comes to mass surveillance.
In a statement responding to the news out of Groton Monday, Flock Safety spokesperson Courtney Terlecki said police departments nationwide “are solving countless serious crimes and making a measurable public safety impact with Flock technology.”
“When a tool that is actively helping solve violent crimes, locate suspects, and find missing people is removed, public safety moves backward,” said Terlecki. “That has real consequences: cases will take longer to solve, organized retail theft crews will operate with fewer obstacles, an Amber Alert may not be returned home, and victims may wait longer, or indefinitely, for justice.”
Terlecki claimed Flock’s cameras “supported more than 1 million criminal investigations and incidents” in 2025, which she said amounted to about 20% of solved cases in places where the cameras are installed. In that same year, she said Flock “helped locate more than 10,000 missing persons.”
That sentiment has been echoed by local police chiefs whose departments have made use of Flock’s cameras, but in recent months the number of departments in Massachusetts who actively use the cameras has fallen sharply, each giving different reasons for doing so. In Littleton the town has removed most of the cameras with the final two set to be removed soon after it was found that Flock had turned them back on without informing the town during a temporary shutdown of the system Littleton had begun in May.
Multiple other police departments, like Stow and New Bedford, have moved to shut the cameras off after it was discovered that officers had been abusing the system to track former significant others.
In Bellingham, the police said they were going to stop using the cameras after the discovery of undisclosed artificial intelligence tools within the camera, which Police Chief Kenneth Fitzgerald said “go beyond what most people would think of as a traditional license plate reader.”
The announcement from Groton brings the total number of communities to have stopped using the cameras or moved to cancel their Flock contracts to at least 18. That figure includes Littleton, Easton, Cambridge, Watertown, Framingham, Natick, Brookline, Salem, Hopkinton, Wellesley, Bellingham, Douglas, Grafton, East Bridgewater, Attleboro, New Bedford, Stow and now Groton. In some of those communities and others where Flock is still used, residents have raised concerns over whether Flock has been forthcoming about the extent of its cameras systems’ abilities, the cybersecurity protecting the data collected by the cameras and with who has access to that data besides the local police department.
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