Erie County drivers deserve license plate camera rules written by lawmakers, not by Flock

By Staff Reporter

This is an opinion column. It reflects the views of the writer.

For months, three Cheektowaga police dispatchers used the town’s Flock license plate cameras to follow a co-worker’s car. An internal audit eventually caught it. The department suspended them in September, and Erie County prosecutors decided this month that what they did was not a crime.

That should worry every driver in Western New York. If tracking a colleague for months is not a crime, the only things standing between your car’s movements and a curious employee are a town policy and a vendor’s software settings. Nobody you elected wrote either one.

It is time for the people we do elect, in Cheektowaga’s Town Hall, the Erie County Legislature and Albany, to write the rules into law.

A system that grew without a law behind it

As the Chronicle reported Sunday, the Public Integrity Unit of the Erie County District Attorney’s Office found no criminal conduct. “The allegations did not rise to the level of criminal conduct,” the DA’s office told WKBW.

Investigative Post found that 20 police agencies in Erie and Niagara counties ran more than 218,000 searches of the Flock network between January 2025 and early June 2026. Cheektowaga ran nearly 48,000 of them, more than any other local agency, and reported capturing nearly 545,000 plates in a single month. It shares its camera data with 170 other police agencies.

No state law governs any of it. “Currently, there is no regulatory framework in New York State that outlines restrictions and unlawful use of ALPR systems on behalf of New York State entities and law enforcement,” reads the sponsor’s memo for Assembly Bill A.10808.

The promises were already on the record

In May, Police Chief Brian Coons told the Town Board that officers must enter a case number and a reason for each search, that the system is audited monthly and that data is kept for 30 days, the Cheektowaga Bee reported. “We’re not invading anybody’s privacy,” he said.

Four months later, the department said its own audit showed three dispatchers had searched another employee’s plate for months, Spectrum News reported. The town has not said when the searches began, or how they went on that long under a monthly audit. Residents deserve that answer in public.

Supervisor Brian Nowak deserves credit for not pretending the problem is solved. “We have made some changes in the oversight of the system. There is still some more work to do,” he said at the Oct. 13 board meeting, according to WKBW.

He has asked the right questions, too. Town boards and city councils, he told WBEN, should ask “how transparent are these systems? How can we verify the monitoring? How can we know the oversight is working in such a way that we can actually tell what the users are doing.” The answers should not depend on who is supervisor or which vendor holds the contract.

The vendor is writing the rules

Today the strongest safeguards come from the company. In August, Flock said every police customer must use its misuse-detection tool and attach case codes to searches by year’s end, and it cut its recommended retention to seven days. “Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable,” Chief Executive Garrett Langley wrote.

That is welcome. But existing customers keep the retention periods they already set, and a company can change its policy as easily as it adopted it. Switching vendors does not fix this either. Amherst is replacing its Flock cameras with Axon readers, and Mr. Nowak himself has warned that a town that drops Flock for another company still has license plate readers.

Elected oversight is thin. Village of Lancaster Trustee Gavin O’Brien told Investigative Post the village had no say when town police installed plate readers there, and said the oversight he could exercise over a new police drone program was “minimal.”

The best case for the cameras

The case for these systems is real, and the cameras do help solve crimes. Chief Coons has said his department is short-staffed. “This Flock system allows us to overcome such impediments,” he told the board. In Amherst, Capt. Gregg Huller told Investigative Post that detectives “have been actively using Flock to locate stolen vehicles or vehicles associated with the larcenies.”

None of that argues against rules. It argues for rules that let the public trust the tool. As one Cheektowaga resident told the Town Board, “I am not against Flock cameras. I am against the abuses and the fact that we do not have sufficient guardrails.”

The other side of the ledger is just as real. “Where you come and go is private information,” Jonathan Manes, senior counsel at the MacArthur Justice Center, told Investigative Post. A record of where every car has been is valuable to detectives. It is valuable to anyone else with a login, too.

What should happen now

The Cheektowaga Town Board should adopt a local law before it approves any more cameras. It should set a retention period, require a case number for every search, bar sharing outside New York without a warrant and require quarterly audit summaries at a public meeting. Once discipline is final, the board should release the timeline of the dispatcher case.

The Erie County Legislature should require its approval and a published use policy before any county agency, including the Sheriff’s Office, deploys or expands plate readers.

Western New York’s state lawmakers should back a statewide standard. A.10808, sponsored by Assemblymember Pamela Hunter, and its Senate companion, S.9890, sponsored by Sen. Michelle Hinchey, would limit when agencies may use plate data, require public reporting and set penalties. Neither has left committee, and no Western New York legislator is listed as a sponsor. Their 48-hour deletion rule is open to debate. Flock now recommends seven days, and Chief Coons said in May that Cheektowaga keeps data for 30. But New York needs a number written in law, not a setting in a vendor’s dashboard.

Both bills expire when the two-year session ends this year. In January, Western New York’s delegation should co-sponsor a reintroduced version or offer a better one, and ask for a hearing in Buffalo.

Residents should do what Cheektowaga’s residents have done: show up. Ask your town board how long it keeps plate data, who can search it and who checks the searches. If the answer is “trust us,” that is the problem.

Featured photo: A Flock Safety license plate reader camera outside a retail store in Aurora, Colo. Photo by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped.