The Shaky Evidence That Flock Cameras Reduce Crime Rates
Flock has been promoting a recent study of its cameras' impacts on car theft. But the paper didn't demonstrate a causal effect.
Do Flock cameras actually reduce crime? A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates.
Flock Safety has been promoting a working paper that examines whether the company's controversial and hotly debated cameras improve outcomes for motor vehicle theft. To test the effects of Flock's surveillance network, the study uses data from 216 agencies that began using Flock in the period from 2017 to 2023, and 3,108 agencies that did not. The authors then evaluated the cameras' effects on monthly motor vehicle thefts, arrest rates for motor vehicle theft, and the recovery time of stolen cars following ALPR deployment.
The study's findings include an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft, a 15.9 percent increase in motor vehicle theft arrests, and a reduction of 0.28 days in the median recovery time for some stolen cars. The authors concluded that "fixed ALPR deployment is associated with lower theft and higher [arrests], alongside a modest reduction in recovery lag among recorded recoveries."
But the data aren't actually that clear, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian law firm and home of the Plate Privacy Project.
IJ Senior Researcher Analyst Matthew West found that motor vehicle thefts and arrest rates in those jurisdictions were already trending in the favored direction months before Flock's cameras were ever in use. Unsurprisingly, many of the places that chose to deploy ALPR systems did so when experiencing high levels of vehicle theft, and engaged in crime-fighting initiatives beyond partnering with Flock. Because the study doesn't compare places on similar trajectories, it is unclear how much credit the cameras, as opposed to those other initiatives, deserve for causing motor vehicle thefts to fall and arrests to rise.
"Because there were already differences in arrests and thefts trends before ALPR deployment, we don't know if the differences in ALPR deployment were caused by ALPR deployment," West explained in a statement.
West goes on to point out that the authors were able to obtain an 11 percent drop in motor vehicle theft only "when the data are weighted in favor of agencies that had a bigger problem to begin with." By contrast, if "the data are instead averaged across all agencies (or weighted by population), the study finds no statistically significant change" in the number of thefts.
The study's data have other complications that the authors did not fully account for. One is the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, which impacted both the level of crime and the number of people driving across the country. Another is the viral "Kia Challenge" on social media, which led to increased Kia and Hyundai thefts. Such "events may have contributed to motor vehicle theft rising and falling at different times in different places," writes West, further complicating whether ALPR cameras did, in fact, cause favorable changes in the data.
These criticisms don't necessarily mean the study's results are wrong, but they do show that the full picture hasn't been explored.
Flock has been using the working paper's results to defend its cameras against an ongoing national backlash. But as much as the company may wish otherwise, the scrutiny of ALPR surveillance technology is far from over.
