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Two external law enforcement agencies accessed Lynnwood’s Flock license plate reader (ALPR) database for immigration-related searches, contradicting state law and promises from the Lynnwood Police Department (LPD) prior to the City Council approving the cameras. Police point to a lack of communication from Flock, stating the breach came by surprise.
When seeking council approval in January, LPD Chief Cole Langdon said the cameras would only be used to trace vehicles involved in crimes, recover stolen property, aid in AMBER Alerts, locate missing persons and support violent crime investigations. He assured the council the cameras would not be used for immigration enforcement or tracking people seeking health care, as prohibited under Washington law. The cameras went live in June.
Records obtained by Lynnwood Today show that federal agencies did not directly access Lynnwood’s data, nor did LPD participate in immigration operations. However, two days after the cameras became operational on June 29, police noticed “something wasn’t right,” seeing a surge of unauthorized searches from out-of-state agencies.
Notably, the Jacksonville, Florida, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania Sheriff’s Offices listed “immigration” as the reason for searches on July 2, 3 and 7, according to logs obtained by researchers at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. The findings were published Oct. 21 in the study Leaving the Door Wide Open: Flock Surveillance Systems Expose Washington Data to Immigration Enforcement.
The out-of-state searches confused Langdon and department staff. “We never agreed to any such thing,” Langdon said. Upon contacting Flock, he discovered the company enrolled LPD in an undisclosed pilot program, granting over 6,000 agencies (with over 8,000 cameras nationwide) enrolled in the program access to each other’s data This included agencies where it’s legal for police to assist in immigration operations.
An August report by 9 News in Denver noted the program was intended to connect agencies nationwide for drug and human trafficking investigations. The setup inadvertently allowed U.S. Border Patrol both direct and indirect access to Flock data in Washington. UW researchers found that out-of-state agencies sometimes conducted immigration-related searches on behalf of federal agencies.
It is unclear whether the Florida and Pennsylvania departments were acting for Border Patrol. Despite efforts to contact those agencies, Langdon said he has “no idea” of the outcome, stating the case information provided was incomplete. Neither department had responded to Lynnwood Today’s public records requests at the time of reporting.
“Our primary goal was to make sure that the people of Lynnwood trusted the police department,” Langdon said Monday. “Finding out that feature was activated without it being disclosed to us was unfortunate.”
By July 9, LPD disabled the feature, restricting access to a limited number of Washington law enforcement agencies. The department is negotiating memorandums of understanding with Snohomish County and other agencies to clarify best practices and pause sharing with departments that allow federal immigration access, Langdon said.
“Very quickly I realized that I did not want agencies from outside our state to have access,” Langdon said, noting concerns about state privacy protections for health care and reproductive services.
In response to the Colorado report, Flock acknowledged it had “inadvertently provided inaccurate information” to involved agencies and said it would now separate federal agencies from general access to prevent similar issues.
Between June 29 and Aug. 24, UW researchers found Lynnwood’s 24 cameras were searched more than 100,000 times, with over 40,000 searches by external agencies. Seven of those searches from Florida and Pennsylvania involved immigration in early July. Lynnwood’s system, which resets data every 30 days, recorded 683,849 vehicles during that period, including 1,214 hotlisted vehicles, according to Lynwood’s “transparency portal.”
LPD shares Flock data with multiple Washington agencies, including Renton, Tukwila, Arlington, Yakima, Redmond, Marysville, Everett, Mountlake Terrace, Mill Creek, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, Snohomish County 911, and Yakima Educational Service District.
Washington law enforcement does not share data with private camera owners – including neighborhood associations and retailers such as Lowes and Home Depot – though some private entities share footage with LPD.
The department has yet to fulfill Lynnwood Today’s request for an official list of public and private camera locations. However, “deflock” is an online map showing the location of user-reported public and private Flock cameras in Lynnwood and across the U.S.
According to LPD policy, every officer accessing the system must undergo training, provide a specific reason code and case or incident number for each search, and use cameras only for official law enforcement purposes. Internal audits found no misuse by LPD staff. Agencies accessing Lynnwood data are prohibited from using it for immigration enforcement, tracking vehicles to health care facilities, personal use, or monitoring First Amendment–protected activities.
The UW study found three ways federal agencies accessed ALPR data from at least 17 Washington law enforcement agencies:
Front door access: Direct network sharing with Border Patrol or federal agencies. This includes the Benton County Sheriff’s Office and police departments in the cities of Arlington, Auburn, Lakewood, Richland, Sunnyside, Wenatchee,\ and Yakima.
Back door access: Federal agencies accessed data from departments that had not explicitly granted access, including Black Diamond, Centralia, Chehalis, East Wenatchee, Eatonville, Ellensburg, Grandview, Mukilteo, Prosser and Renton.
Side door access: Local agencies conducted searches in Washington and nationwide on behalf of ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, or the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, although data provided made it hard to determine how many times this happened.
Researchers note compliance depends on accurate reporting of search purposes, which can be vague, such as “investigation” or “criminal investigation,” making oversight difficult, Phill Neff, one of the researchers for the UW study said in an interview Friday with Lynnwood Today.
“It depends a lot on the good faith of the actors in charge and their understanding of law and their interpretation of the law,” Neff said.
Chief Langdon concurred: “We have to hope our user agreement holds up, being together and talking as police entities or as municipalities in this region is where the power is,” he said. “But you have to be careful with that and there has to be good auditing and good accountability mechanisms.”
Since installation, LPD requires agencies in Washington accessing Lynnwood’s data to sign user agreements, report specific reason codes for every search, and ensure internal searches are also verified by a human trained in the software after being filtered through artificial intelligence, Langdon said. Audits are also conducted annually, reviewing sample inquiries for compliance with law and policy.
Read the full study here.
Learn more about Lynnwood’s Flock cameras here.
— Contact Ashley at ashley@myedmondsnews.com.
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