A Flock Safety sales representative reportedly offered Sheboygan, Wisconsin, five years of data from the city's own license plate cameras — raising a narrow question about the 30-day retention limit Rhode Island agencies have cited for years.
Uprise RI · Rocco Caravaggio · September 4, 2026
A Flock Safety sales representative reportedly offered Sheboygan, Wisconsin, five years of data from the city's own license plate cameras — raising a narrow question about the 30-day retention limit Rhode Island agencies have cited for years.
Rhode Island drivers pass through hundreds of Flock cameras run by separate municipal and State Police networks, and the 30-day deletion promise officials cite covers raw plate reads — not the analytics Flock's contract defines as company property.
On August 25, the city of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, announced that its police chief, Kurt Zempel, and its city administrator, Casey Bradley, would ask the Common Council to terminate the city's contract with Flock Safety — the Atlanta-based surveillance company whose automated license plate readers, cameras that photograph passing vehicles and convert the images into searchable records of plate characters, time, location, make, color and body type, have quietly become a fixture of American roadsides, including several hundred of them here in Rhode Island. In the meantime, the city said, staff had physically covered the 15 cameras that had been operating since early 2024 to stop any further collection of license plate data. The city's statement said police became aware in July of conduct it believed was inconsistent with the contract's terms and the city's expectations, and that the conduct undermined trust — even while crediting the technology with helping solve serious cases.
What the city's own statement did not say, and what FOX6 Milwaukee reported on Thursday, is what that conduct allegedly was: according to that reporting, a Flock sales representative emailed Sheboygan's Engineering Department offering the city five years of speed and vehicle-movement data captured by Sheboygan's own cameras. Mayor Eric Sorenson told FOX6 the city had not been told the cameras were collecting or retaining that information. The email itself has not been made public. Neither has the dataset. That matters, and I'll come back to it.
Here is why a Wisconsin city of 50,000 people on Lake Michigan should interest a Rhode Islander stuck in traffic on Route 6. Sheboygan's signed order form with Flock, executed November 8, 2023, covering 15 cameras, a 24-month initial term, a 24-month renewal and a total price of $93,750, specified a retention period of 30 days. Thirty days is the same number Rhode Island agencies have been reciting to their own residents for years. The Providence Police Department's ALPR policy , revised in April, says Flock will purge its hosted data after 30 days. Rhode Island State Police General Order 80-G, revised January 16, says the same: the State Police own the data, and Flock automatically purges captured plate data after 30 days. The transparency portals Flock hosts for its Rhode Island customers repeat the figure like a catechism — Providence, 60 cameras, 30 days; Pawtucket, 22 cameras, 30 days, and 431,758 unique plate reads logged in a recent 30-day window; East Providence, 23 cameras, 30 days, 510,159 unique reads; Cumberland, 12 cameras, 30 days, with sharing partners listed across three states. While the cameras are most certainly a violation of the 4th amendment's protections against unreasonable searches by the government - GPS vehicle tracking is illegal and Flock cameras essentially perform the same function in a more rudimentary manner - courts have come up with rather novel explanations to allow the constitutional violations to proceed.
So the narrow, defensible question raised by Sheboygan — is this: does the 30-day number cover everything a Flock camera produces, or only the raw plate reads and the metadata attached to them?
Flock's contract language suggests the answer is more complicated than the number implies. The company's standard terms and conditions , last updated August 21, define "Customer Data" to include information captured by Flock hardware and its associated metadata, and say plainly that the customer owns it. Fine. But the same document separately defines "Flock Property" to include derivative works, intermediate and final outputs, analyses, reports, models and other results generated through the service — and those belong to Flock. The terms also grant the company a perpetual license to use customer data to provide and improve its services, and state that the retention period is whatever the individual order form says it is. A 30-day purge of the raw reads and a perpetual license over what the company builds from them are not contradictory statements. They are two different statements about two different things, and only one of them ever makes it into the reassuring paragraph a police chief reads aloud at a council meeting.
To be fair to Flock, the five-year Sheboygan offer did not appear to involve raw plate images, or identifiable vehicle histories. The company says it does not sell customer data. No sale is documented. No Flock statement addressing the Sheboygan episode specifically has surfaced. And nothing in the record shows that Flock holds five years of Rhode Island plate reads. What the record does show is that an offer of five years of something derived from a city's cameras arrived in a city department's inbox, from a company that city believed was deleting things after 30 days, and that the city's response was to put covers over the lenses.
The 30-day figure comes with a second asterisk that has nothing to do with Flock. Providence's policy expressly permits the department to retain relevant vehicle data after the vendor purge when the information may become evidence, is subject to discovery, or must be preserved under law or the city's records schedule. The State Police policy works the same way: criminal information obtained during an investigation may be preserved in Evidence.com under applicable records-retention rules. Which is entirely ordinary police practice — evidence is supposed to survive — but it means the honest sentence is not "the data disappears in 30 days." The honest sentence is "the vendor's copy of the raw read is deleted on a rolling 30-day basis unless somebody downloads it first." Sheboygan's own 2023 contract said as much in its recitals: Flock deletes on a rolling basis, and customers are responsible for extracting and archiving what they want to keep.
The company's public materials have gotten harder to pin down, too. On August 13, Flock announced it was changing its recommended default retention period from 30 days to seven and introducing an "Evidence Mode" for data tied to active investigations, while stating that existing customers keep their current contractually approved periods — which means Providence, Pawtucket, Cumberland and the State Police did not automatically move to seven days, and their order forms remain the authoritative documents. Flock's own deletion guide says exactly that: the order form controls. Meanwhile the company's Evidence Policy page still describes a 30-day default and hard deletion at 30 days. Two numbers, one website.
Rhode Island's exposure here is not small, and it is not centralized. The ACLU of Rhode Island, which has campaigned against the technology and whose count is advocacy research rather than any state-maintained inventory, estimates at least 280 Flock cameras statewide as of Thursday, while conceding the precise figure is difficult to establish. Nobody at the State House can give you a better one. Each municipal department signs its own contract, writes its own policy, and configures its own sharing relationships; Providence's portal listed nine sharing partners including the State Police and departments in Milford, Seekonk and Sharon, Massachusetts. The State Police operate a separate network — Bristol town materials from November 12 described a planned statewide State Police buildout of 39 cameras, with RISP rather than each municipality holding the contract. It is a plate of surveillance policy assembled the way my grandmother assembled Sunday dinner: everybody bringing a dish, nobody agreeing on the recipe, and the result somehow served as though it were one meal.
Governor Dan McKee ordered a 60-day statewide review of ALPR privacy and data governance on August 18, calling for uniform statewide standards on privacy, data use, transparency and consultation with local communities, and pausing new State Police installations while urging — not ordering — municipalities to hold off on new ones of their own. Existing State Police cameras keep running under current policies. The review is therefore examining a live network, not a mothballed one. H 8077, introduced in the House on February 27 to establish a statutory framework for license plate readers, was held for further study, which in Smith Hill dialect means it is not law and will have to be reintroduced.
Which brings the review, and the legislation McKee says he wants to work on with lawmakers, to a question worth putting in writing before the 60 days run out: not whether the raw reads vanish on schedule, but what each Rhode Island contract says about the analyses, reports, models and outputs built from them, who owns those, and how long they live. Sheboygan's Common Council takes up the termination request Tuesday.
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Narragansett's council voted Monday to cancel its Flock Safety license-plate camera contract effective immediately, without knowing the penalty — after the police chief asked for a delay and a civil liberties group urged removal.