Wilmington is taking down its two Flock Safety license plate cameras. Town officials said Monday that the contract is being canceled and that both cameras, one at Middlesex Avenue and Federal Street since March 2023 and one at Main Street and Bridge Lane since June 2024, will be removed “as soon as possible,” according to WCVB. The police department said the cameras had been “instrumental in investigations,” and the town said residents’ privacy concerns and questions about how Flock uses the data outweighed continued use. Wilmington becomes, by our count, the eighteenth Massachusetts community we can document leaving Flock, and the second in two days after Boston’s disclosure that Flock shared its pilot data with outside agencies despite a contract requiring it not to.
This is a short report on what Wilmington did, why the reasoning it gave matters, and what a resident of a town that still has the cameras can take from it.
What Wilmington said
The town’s statement, as reported, made two points that are worth separating. The first is that the cameras worked: police called them instrumental. The second is that the town is ending the contract anyway, because of concerns about privacy and about “the way Flock uses data.” That is a different rationale from the one in many earlier cancellations, where the stated reason was cost, or a pending contract renewal, or a police chief’s own reassessment. Wilmington is saying the tool is useful and the vendor’s handling of the data is the problem.
The town’s statement also referred to measures Flock has announced in response to the wave of cancellations: an auditing tool that flags abnormal search behavior, retention of plate data for a week rather than a month, and more municipal control over sharing with other agencies. Wilmington’s decision is a judgment that those measures are not enough. It came one day after Boston’s 2025 Surveillance Technology Report disclosed that during Boston’s 2025 pilot, Flock’s data-sharing function was on for three days despite a contract requiring it off and the vendor’s confirmation that it was off. Whether Wilmington’s decision was informed by the Boston report was not stated, but the timing and the reasoning line up.
What a two-camera town tells you
Wilmington’s deployment was small: two cameras, on two roads, for roughly two and three years. The data question does not scale down with the camera count. Two cameras on the main routes through a town of 23,000 record most of the vehicles that enter and leave it, every day, and under the default sharing settings that data was available to the thousands of agencies on Flock’s national network for the entire period. A town with two cameras has the same question as a city with forty-five: who else could see the data, and did the town control the answer. Wilmington’s statement suggests it concluded it did not.
The town did not say what happens to the data already collected. Under Flock’s standard terms the data is retained for a set period and then deleted, and the retention window is now a week. The historical data from 2023 and 2024, retained under the thirty-day window then in effect, is gone by operation of that window. What was searched, by whom, during those years is a record Flock holds and the town may or may not have requested. A resident who wants to know can ask the town for its audit logs under the public records law.
Where this leaves the map
The ACLU of Massachusetts counted 25 communities that had canceled contracts or ended pilots as of early September. Our running list, which names only those we can document from public announcements or reporting, is now at 18 with Wilmington and Boston added this week. Communities that have left include Watertown, Cambridge, Salem, Framingham, Hopkinton, Waltham, Boylston, Grafton, East Bridgewater and Cohasset, among others, and the list is in Every Massachusetts town that has dropped Flock cameras. Quincy, by contrast, has defended its closed-system deployment publicly.
The bill that would have set statewide rules, H.3755, cleared committee unanimously in March and died in Ways and Means at the end of the session. Every cancellation since is a town answering, on its own, a question the Legislature declined to answer for all of them.
If your town still has the cameras
Three questions to put to the select board or the police chief, in writing: Is data sharing with outside agencies enabled, and with which agencies? What is the retention period in the town’s contract, not in Flock’s marketing? And has the town ever pulled the audit log of searches run on its cameras? The towns that have canceled have generally done so after getting the answers. The towns that have kept the cameras have generally not been asked.
Common questions
Why did Wilmington cancel its Flock contract?
The town said residents’ privacy concerns and questions about how Flock uses data outweighed continued use, even though police said the cameras had been instrumental in investigations.
How many cameras did Wilmington have?
Two: Middlesex Avenue at Federal Street since March 2023 and Main Street at Bridge Lane since June 2024. Both will be removed as soon as possible.
How many Massachusetts towns have dropped Flock?
The ACLU of Massachusetts counts 25. Our documented running list stands at 18 after Wilmington and Boston.
What happens to the data already collected?
Flock deletes plate data after its retention window, now a week. The town did not address historical data or audit logs; a resident may request the town’s records under the public records law.
Wilmington facts and quotations from WCVB, September 15, 2026. Boston pilot findings from the City of Boston 2025 Surveillance Technology Report as reported by WBUR, September 14. Count of communities from the ACLU of Massachusetts and our own running list. General information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice.