Private surveillance vendor Flock Safety reinstalled all of its stationary license plate cameras in Evanston that had previously been removed, apparently doing so without authorization from the city, which sent the company a cease-and-desist order Tuesday afternoon demanding that the cams be taken back down.

The city previously ordered Flock to shut down 19 automated license plate readers (18 stationary and one flex camera that can be attached to a squad car) provided by the company and put its contract with Flock on a 30-day termination notice on Aug. 26.

This decision came after Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias discovered that Flock had allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois cameras in a “pilot program” against state law, and after the RoundTable reported in June that out-of-state law enforcement agencies were able to search Flock’s data for assistance in immigration cases.

Flock had removed 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall each one at or near its prior location by Tuesday. City spokesperson Cynthia Vargas said in a written statement that the city has not deviated from or made any changes to its policies “since the earlier contract termination, meaning Flock reinstalled the cameras without the city’s permission.”

“Recently, we became aware that Flock has reinstalled the physical cameras that they had previously taken down,” Vargas wrote. “We immediately issued a cease-and-desist order to Flock. Earlier this afternoon, Flock committed to promptly removing the cameras.”

Flock did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the RoundTable on Tuesday night.

The city first installed Flock cameras in late 2022 and early 2023 as part of two separate one-year contracts, and City Council later approved a single five-year contract extension in January 2024.

The city has paid the first two years of that extension but would still owe $145,500 for the final three years if the contract is upheld. The city intends to terminate the contract on Sept. 26 under its notice to Flock, but the company is challenging that termination, and the dispute could escalate to litigation.

Same spots, with some different models

The RoundTable mapped and photographed each of the 18 stationary cameras in June, and site visits on Sept. 8 confirmed that all but three had been removed by Flock. The last three, which appear to have never been removed, are the north-facing cameras at Howard Street’s intersections with Chicago, Ridge and Dodge avenues.

Further site visits Tuesday confirmed that the 15 removed cameras had been replaced at the same locations. Most of them were banded back onto public streetlight fixtures where they were placed before, while five located on east-west streets along McCormick Boulevard had individual poles reinstalled into the ground. Near three of these pole mounts were freshly spray painted lines, the word “FLOCK” and numbers appearing to designate the cameras individually.

A Reddit user posted a photo to the r/Evanston subreddit on Monday evening showing a worker installing one of these pole mounts and its camera earlier that morning at the corner of McCormick and Main Street.

The worker is seen on a ladder holding the camera’s solar panel in front of the pole mount, and behind them is an Enterprise-branded rental van parked on the sidewalk in front of the sign for the Skokie Northshore Channel Park. Although this camera and the one at McCormick and Oakton Street are installed outside of Evanston’s city limits, they both fall under Evanston’s contract with Flock, rather than Skokie’s.

Click on the images in the gallery above to see them full screen.

Additionally, not all of the reinstalled cameras were “Falcon” models — the long, oval-shaped camera with a solar panel and battery packs that was previously used in every location.

At five locations, there was instead a stubbier camera that looks similar to the “Standard” model currently advertised on Flock’s website, except with an extra attachment under the main body. These five also appear to lack solar panels, instead attaching to several previously unseen boxes, and at least one camera is attached to a wire connected to the city-owned light post it’s mounted to, suggesting it may draw power from the city’s grid.

Click on the images in the gallery above to see them full screen.

Analysis: Flock’s data suggests cams could be active

Even before any cameras were initially removed, none of them were supposed to be collecting any data. The city wrote in its Aug. 26 announcement that the 19 cameras were “no longer collecting or providing license plate reader data to the Flock network,” and EPD Cmdr. Scott Sophier reconfirmed this to the RoundTable on Sept. 8.

“The last read on an Evanston Flock camera was logged shortly before 1:00 p.m. on August 26th, which is consistent with the City’s request for de-activation,” Sophier said at the time.

However, Flock’s own publicly available data suggests that may not be the case.

The company maintains a “transparency portal” webpage for Evanston that updates daily with basic data on the cameras’ operations, including “Number of LPR [license plate readers] and other cameras” and “Vehicles detected in the last 30 days.” The RoundTable has tracked this page since shortly after the city’s shutdown order, logging the data and archiving updates on most days.

The “Number of LPR and other cameras” figure was at 19 when the shutdown was ordered, matching Evanston’s 19 cameras, but it later dropped to 10 on Aug. 30. Rather than falling to zero, however, the figure stayed at 10 until Sept. 16, when it increased to 12, eventually returning to 19 on Sept. 23, matching the reinstallation of all the cameras.

Meanwhile, the “Vehicles detected in the last 30 days” number has steadily decreased since the shutdown order, with each passing update rolling off another day when the cameras were known to be active. However, the figure has not decreased enough over time to actually reach zero once 30 days have passed.

When the RoundTable began tracking this figure on Aug. 28, it stood at 439,542 vehicles detected over approximately 28 days of active cameras. To reach zero by 30 days post-shutdown, the figure would need to drop by an average of around 15,700 each day, because every new day added to the data should have included zero new vehicles detected.

Based on the city’s Aug. 26 termination notice, there should only be two full days’ worth of vehicle detections left on Flock’s data portal as of late Tuesday, Sept. 23. But the page still reports 155,507 vehicles detected in the last 30 days, yielding a reduction of 284,035 vehicles over 26 days, or around 10,924 per day — well below the reduction rate needed to reach zero.

This trend means that on Friday, Sept. 26, when more than 30 days will have passed since the city’s cameras were supposed to be shut down, Flock will still report some number of vehicles as being detected in the prior 30 days. That suggests some number of cameras may have remained active and logging vehicles after Aug. 26, in violation of the city’s order and without the city’s knowledge, as indicated by Sophier’s response to the RoundTable on Sept. 8.

“Flock has not indicated to the City in direct communications that any ALPR’s are active or have been re-activated,” Sophier wrote. “There is no indication that Flock did not honor/fulfill the City’s request and also no indication on the City’s end to show any plate reads since the aforementioned date/time.”

Flock did not answer questions about this data sent by the RoundTable on Sept. 8. Site visits by the RoundTable that day confirmed that the 15 aforementioned cameras had been removed by that time.

Update: The City of Evanston has covered up the Flock cameras while waiting for their removal.