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Pichardo was 28, five years into the job, and alone in his cruiser during one of the brief lulls between responding to the typical churn of radio calls for domestic disputes, petty disturbances, and welfare checks. The camera was compact and solar-powered, angled down toward passing traffic. Pichardo made a U-turn and drove beneath it again, more slowly this time, to get a better look.
He then began searching for the cameras on roads near highway ramps, at major intersections, along the routes into and out of the city. He found them again and again. By the time Pichardo finished circling the district, he knew exactly where he had seen them before.
Two years earlier, officers had gathered on the second floor of a small police substation in Pawtucket for a presentation about a surveillance system made by Flock Safety. A high-ranking police official stood in front of a PowerPoint and explained that the company’s automatic license plate readers could identify passing vehicles not only by their license plates but by bumper stickers, roof racks, and other distinguishing features. Investigators could search for a particular car across jurisdictions and, camera by camera, reconstruct where it had been.
The system was presented as another tool of routine police work, a way to recover stolen cars, locate suspects, and find missing people. But as Pichardo listened, he found himself thinking less about the vehicles police wanted than about all the others. In a medium-size city like Pawtucket, where a handful of roads carried people nearly everywhere they needed to go, a record of a car’s movements amounted to a record of a person’s life—the places they visited, the people they saw, the routines they followed.
As Pichardo understood it, the Flock proposal had gone nowhere because the city could not afford a permanent installation. So he let it slip from his mind.
But now, on that afternoon on West Avenue, the cameras were all over his district.
Pawtucket’s cameras are one small piece of a sprawling vehicle-surveillance system that touches nearly every state in the country. Flock markets its platform as the nation’s largest fixed license-plate-reader network, processing billions of sightings each month. Because departments can open their records to agencies elsewhere, a camera installed by one municipality can become searchable by investigators hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In 2021, around the time of Pichardo’s training, Flock offered Pawtucket police a free 60-day pilot. Seventeen cameras went up around the city as part of a regional test that also included Cranston and Woonsocket, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The rollout quickly drew criticism. The ACLU of Rhode Island accused the department of installing the cameras surreptitiously, after the pilot began without prior public input or notice to the city council. Pawtucket chief of police Tina Goncalves later apologized, saying that the department would “work better in the future” to communicate with the city council.
The pilot ended later that year, and in May 2023 the local TV news reported that Pawtucket was not moving forward with the installation. Pichardo believed the idea was a dead letter.
It was not. In September 2023, records show, Pawtucket moved forward with a two-year deployment worth $128,000. Records show that the city planned to install 20 cameras along many of its busiest roads, including Newport Avenue, Main Street, Broadway, Smithfield Avenue, and West Avenue—where Pichardo first noticed one hanging over the road.
“Wait a minute,” Pichardo recalled thinking. “When did we make this decision to put these up?”
Within months, Pichardo’s questions would set off a chain of events that, he says, ended his career in law enforcement. They would also eventually place him, somewhat improbably, at the center of a backlash against Flock that unites large factions of the American left and right.
Having spent some of his childhood in a poor neighborhood where drugs and gangs were part of the landscape, Pichardo says he learned that it was safest to keep his opinions to himself and stay out of other people’s business. When he was 12 or 13, he learned that his father, who had returned to the Dominican Republic several years earlier, had done so because he had a criminal record and was told it would be best if he left the country. Becoming a police officer offered a way of drawing a line between his father’s path and his own. After studying in the criminal justice program at Salve Regina University in Newport, Pichardo entered the police academy and joined the Pawtucket department in 2018. To hear him describe it, he’s always been something of an outlier on the force. “I’m possibly the only cop who would voluntarily go to musicals,” he once told me.
In the weeks following that fall shift when he first noticed Flock cameras all over town, Pichardo kept picking at the question of how the cameras had returned. Detectives, he says he learned after asking around the department, were already using the system, though many patrol officers like himself appeared to know little about it.
Pichardo contacted his work district’s local city council rep and asked how the cameras had been approved—his first time speaking to a politician, he says—but didn’t emerge with a clear answer. (Records show that the department had notified the purchasing board that it planned to move forward, but there was no public vote before the cameras were installed. The question of approval surfaced only afterward, when a council member asked whether the deployment should have come before the council. Officials said no. Installing the cameras was, they explained, an “administrative prerogative.”)
Police officers swear oaths to uphold the law and report wrongdoing. Inside the department, Pichardo said, the unwritten rule was simpler: Don’t rat. He understood that speaking publicly could end his career. But he says he was inspired by whistleblowers lik...
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