84% of drivers stopped by Oak Park police in Flock traffic stops were Black
Oak Park’s eight Flock Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras scan over 300,0000 vehicles every month. Most of these scans are stored in a database where they are accessible to Oak Park police and shared with police departments across the country. A tiny fraction of those scans trigger an alert because the license plate is on a law enforcement agency’s “hot list,” usually as a stolen vehicle. This blog post is the first in a series exploring the impact these cameras, and the traffic stops that they precipitate, have had on our community.
The Oak Park Police Department provides regular updates to the Citizen Police Oversight Committee (CPOC) on how the cameras are being used. CPOC consolidated the data from these updates and included the details in its semi-annual report that was published in October 2023.
According to CPOC’s report, Oak Park’s Flock cameras collected a staggering amount of data in the first ten months of use. From August 2022 through May 2023, Oak Park’s eight Flock cameras…
Scanned approximately 3 million license plates. Of these 3 million scans,
42 Flock Safety data alerts were triggered. That’s a hit rate of 0.000014%.
We wanted to understand how many of those alerts led to a traffic stop. However, to support our analysis, we had to first define a “flock stop” because the Village has not defined the term. Illinois statute 625 ILCS 5/11-212 requires that police officers “record and report data about every traffic stop they execute – data that includes the race of the driver, the reason for the stop, and the outcome of the stop.” Thus, we defined a Flock stop as “a traffic stop when an officer stops a motorist in conjunction with information from the Flock system.” A count of Flock Stops was derived by applying this definition to the Flock alerts included in CPOC’s report. To ensure we understood the circumstances for each alert, we compared the details included in the semi-annual report with those in the police department’s monthly Flock usage reports and activity reports. Flock alerts not meeting our definition were not counted as Flock stops.
Again, in the first 10 months of use, Oak Park’s Flock cameras had…
3 million license plates scans. Of these approximately 3 million scans,
42 Flock Safety data alerts were triggered. Of these 42 Flock alerts,
25 alerts resulted in a Flock traffic stop. These 25 Flock stops involved
29 people (drivers and passengers) and an overwhelming majority of these people were Black.
84% of the drivers stopped by Oak Park police in a Flock traffic stops were Black.
During our 10 months study period, 84% of the drivers stopped by Oak Park police in a Flock traffic stop were Black. By comparison, the Illinois Traffic Stop Study for 2022 reported that 53% of drivers stopped by Oak Park police in traffic stops were Black. Black residents comprise 19% of Oak Park’s population, and 22.8% of Cook County’s population. Thus, it seems that Flock is amplifying existing racial disparities in Oak Park’s traffic stops.
Call to action
With the Flock contract expiring, Oak Park can choose differently. Join other community members in calling on the Village to cancel the Flock contract and invest these dollars into community-led supports for safety, like violence interruption programs, enacting a non-police mental health response team, or creating a free bike program for youth.
Email Oak Park’s Trustees and demand they cancel flock
Additional reading and data sources
Read more about ALPRs in Oak Park in our zine.
Spreadsheet with CPOC’s Flock alert data for August 2022 through May 2023.
Oak Park and Cook County demographics are from the 2022 American Community Survey 5 year estimates.
For more information on ALPRs, please check out the websites for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Lucy Parsons, and Fight For the Future.
