Cambridge, Framingham, Salem, New Bedford, Natick, Watertown and at least eight other Massachusetts communities have pulled the plug on Flock Safety’s license plate reader cameras this year. Winthrop is keeping its half dozen, and its police chief is not apologetic about it. The town’s decision, and the safeguards it attached, offer a useful frame for a question Chelsea has not publicly asked about its own, much larger camera network.
What Winthrop decided
Winthrop police operate about two dozen cameras in public places around town. Roughly six of them are Flock cameras, rented for about $10,000 a year. Flock’s cameras photograph every passing license plate, run it against hot lists of stolen and wanted vehicles, and store the plate reads in a searchable database that, depending on settings, can be shared with other police departments across the country.
That national sharing is what has driven the wave of cancellations. Reporting over the past year documented officers in other states using Flock searches to track ex-partners, a case of a false alert that led to an armed stop, and searches run on behalf of federal immigration agents in communities whose own policies barred it. “We’re responding to the criticism, because we don’t want the community to ever lose confidence in us,” Chief John Goodwin told the Winthrop Pilot. The response is training for every officer who touches the system and a quarterly internal audit of how it has been used.
Goodwin’s case for keeping the cameras is practical. “If I didn’t have Flocks, I would have to spend endless hours on surveillance,” he said. Town Council President Jim Letterie backed him: “I think they provide an incredible service.” Letterie said he did not see a need for a council debate, though he suggested regular updates from the department on the program’s value. Lee Meyer, the paramedic who challenged State Representative Jeff Turco in the September 1 primary and lost, took the other view: “It’s something that we have to have a debate about, for sure.”
What Chelsea has
Chelsea’s camera network is considerably larger than Winthrop’s, and the city talks about it mostly at budget time. At the May budget hearings, Police Chief Keith Houghton told the council that the department “is run on many different platforms,” with separate software and licensing for body cameras, for “our cameras within the city,” and for other systems. The city has invested in fixed cameras across the downtown and in the neighborhoods for years, and the department’s Downtown Task Force, one of the programs that won Chelsea its All-America City award, relies on them.
Whether any of Chelsea’s cameras are automated license plate readers, whether the city contracts with Flock or a competitor, how long plate data is kept, who can search it and whether it is shared outside the department are not questions we could answer from public documents this week. They are questions worth putting to the department, and we will report any answers the city provides.
Those questions carry particular weight in Chelsea. Nearly half of the city’s residents were born outside the United States. The PROTECT Act, signed August 5, bars Massachusetts police from asking about immigration status during routine work and from holding people on immigration detainers alone, and the state issued its law enforcement guidance under the act on Tuesday. A plate reader database that is shared nationally can be searched by agencies that are not bound by any of that. Several of the communities that dropped Flock cited exactly this gap: they could control their own officers’ conduct, but not what happened to the data once it left town.
The middle path
Winthrop’s approach, keep the cameras and tighten the rules, is the one most departments that have retained Flock have taken. The elements are consistent: a written policy stating what the cameras may be used for, a short retention period for plate reads that do not match a hot list, a log of every search with the officer’s name and the reason, a regular audit that someone outside the unit reviews, and a decision about whether to participate in national sharing at all. Some communities have turned sharing off entirely and kept the cameras for local stolen car and Amber Alert use.
Chelsea’s Charter Review Committee is examining citizen participation and oversight this fall. The City Council has a public safety subcommittee. Either would be a reasonable place to ask the police department to describe, in one public meeting, what the city’s cameras collect, where the data goes, and who checks. Winthrop’s chief volunteered that information to a newspaper. Chelsea’s residents should not have to wait for a controversy to hear it.
Sources: Winthrop Pilot, August 27 and September 2, 2026; Chelsea Record, May 21, 2026; National Civic League 2026 profile of Chelsea; Massachusetts Municipal Association, August 2026, and Revere Journal, September 9, 2026, on the PROTECT Act. Photo: A Flock Safety license plate reader camera, by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.