A Message to the Woodstock Police Department

For some reason the police chief wants you to think that we're anti-police

We've seen some of Chief Lieb’s emails and feel like we need to correct some things. He’s falsely called us anti-government and anti-police. We exercised our first amendment right to speak out against a contract with a company that we feel do not have our best interests in mind and he called it “unnecessary political storm.” He’s said that we want Woodstock to be “less safe”. Who the fuck wants to be less safe? The most worrying thing is that he’s told you that we are questioning your trustworthiness.

We want you to have the tools to keep us safe, just not at the expense of our privacy and civil liberties. Flock safety has proven to be an untrustworthy partner. Its products are easy to hack, they don't take data security seriously, and their entire business model requires the violation of everyone's fourth amendment rights. “Everyone” includes you, your friends and your family.

We're not concerned about your integrity. The fact is that WPD shares its Flock data with 466+ other jurisdictions in Illinois. Multiply that number by the number of users in a typical department and you've got tens of thousands of people with access to 30 days’ worth of our images, video, metadata and time-stamped locations. The reason we want transparency and accountability is to make sure they are not doing something they shouldn't with our data. We've already seen four instances of misuse of the flock system in Illinois (where our data was likely searched), and that is only the number of users that were dumb enough to make dozens or hundreds of illegal searches and get caught.

You guys likely know more police officers than we do. Have you ever met one you've thought was bad at their job? Anybody that you wouldn't trust to watch a sandwich? That's who we're worried about.

It's insane that we're trusting so many people with one-click access to 30 days of our location history. It's insane that we're entrusting this data to Garrett Langley, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and a bunch of other billionaires who don't give a shit about anyone’s safety.

We want you to have the right tools to watch our backs. Flock Safety's products are the wrong tools and Flock Safety is the wrong vendor. Please keep this in mind when your boss tries to convince you that we're anti-police, anti-safety or anti-whatever.

We appreciate what you do and as long as you have our backs, we'll have your backs.