From: Michael Lynch To: Chad Alexander Cc: Easthampton City Council Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:48:12 -0400 Subject: Clarifying details about Easthampton PD's use of Flock Safety data To Chief Alexander, Thank you for speaking at the City Council Finance Committee on June 10th. You responded to concerns I had about Flock Safety cameras, and I wanted to follow up. I want to correct one detail I believe misstated at the meeting. I said that Easthampton PD was sharing Flock data with police departments in Ft. Worth, TX and Adrian, MI. I reviewed the data after you said you believed that was incorrect, and I found that you were correct, and I was mistaken. Those departments share data with Easthampton, but Easthampton does not share data back to them. From checking the data more, the other facts I presented at the council meeting still appear to be accurate. I'm planning to publish an article about Easthampton's use of the Flock Safety system at the end of the week. I also plan to attend the City Council Public Safety Committee meeting on July 7th to discuss my findings. One key point is that you mentioned at the June 10th meeting that as soon after you took over as Police Chief, you disabled all sharing in Flock. I've looked through the data, and I can't find that reflected in Flock's logs. I do see a sudden drop in external requests that begins on 2025-11-18, and the number of unique external departments requesting Easthampton's Flock data goes from about 1000/day to about 50-100/day, but I never see a point in time where external requests match the configuration you describe. I can't say for sure, but based on the data, what seems likely is that prior to 2025-11-18, many external organizations had permission to search Easthampton's Flock data, but on 2025-11-18, sharing was reduced to the ~104 external organizations that have access (as of my data request on 2026-06-08). Here are other details I plan to include in my article, so I want to check them with you to make sure I haven't misunderstood. - As of 2026-06-08, Easthampton PD grants 104 outside organizations access to Easthampton's Flock camera data. - These external organizations include police departments in Nantucket, MA (150 miles away), Dennis, MA (132 miles away), Barnstable, MA (130 miles away), Ipswich, MA (100 miles away), and Kingston, MA (100 miles away). - When outside organizations search Easthampton's Flock camera data, Easthampton PD cannot see the search query (e.g., plate number, vehicle descriptions) or the name of the person performing the search. - There were 4.2 million searches of Easthampton's Flock data between 2025-01-01 and 2026-06-08. - On 2025-04-09, the Johnson County sheriff's department pursued a woman across state lines (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-it) to prosecute her having an abortion. This sheriff had access to Easthampton's Flock camera data and accessed it as part of that investigation (see row 8f5b2c84-9b4a-471f-9c2e-5976684972f3 in 5_1_2025-5_31_2025-Easthampton MA PD-Network-Audit.csv). - The Easthampton PD policy 1.19 on License Plate Readers section IV-B-1 states that "an employee(s) with administrative oversight for the LPR system" is responsible for "[e]stablishing protocols for access, collection, storage, and retendion of LPR data" and "[e]stablishing protocols to ensure the security and integrity of the data captured, storead, and/or retained by the LPR system," but Easthampton PD has no written records of these protocols. - Easthampton PD policy 1.19 on License Plate Readers sections IV-A and IV-E prohibits officers from abusing the Flock system for non-police work, though Easthampton PD does not have systems in place to prevent or detect such abuse. - Easthampton PD policy 1.19 on License Plate Readers section IV-F-1 states that Flock data is retained for only 30 days, though search history reveals that officers routinely search for data older than 30 days and use search windows much larger than 30 days. - e.g., search ac742688-bff7-492e-92ca-42ff7cf03e81 from 2026-03-01 has a 216-day search window. - Easthampton PD estimates that it requires roughly two hours (translating to $50 in fees) to export two search audit log queries in response to my public data request (case 26-610). - This is surprising given that Flock directly supports this feature. My understanding is that the work involved is selecting a start and end date and clicking the "Export" button. If you have an official statement from the Easthampton PD regarding Flock Safety that you'd like me to include in the article, I'm happy to do that. Here is the raw Flock Safety log data that Easthampton PD provided to me in response to my open data requests: https://data.openeasthampton.com/easthampton-ma-flock-requests-2026-06-08.zip Sincerely, Michael Lynch