HOUSTON \u2013 Houston police are the number one searchers of a Flock camera network more than a thousand miles away, according to new data obtained by KPRC 2 News from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.<\/p>\n
The automated license plate readers have gained a lot of attention in recent months over questions and concerns about privacy.<\/p>\n
The data from March through May of this year shows the Houston Police Department ran 183,252 searches of the UNC Charlotte Flock network, which consists of 17 cameras.<\/p>\n
\u201cUNC Charlotte participates in Flock\u2019s law enforcement network and shares limited search capability with participating law enforcement agencies that also share information with UNC Charlotte. For those agencies, a search can indicate whether a particular license plate was detected by a UNC Charlotte camera. The result provides the camera location, date and time. It does not provide the name of the person associated with the vehicle or its registration,\u201d according to UNC\u2019s website<\/a>.<\/p>\n For context, the data shows HPD is the law enforcement agency with the highest amount of searches of UNC\u2019s network, and it\u2019s about five times more than searches conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen an officer runs a license plate in Flock, the system searches a database of images that includes images from any camera shared with our department to identify a potential match,\u201d the Houston Police Department told KPRC 2 News in a statement.<\/p>\n It\u2019s part of a nationwide search feature offered by Flock, which the Pearland Police Department disabled last month.<\/p>\n