Willys DeVoll is a parent, writer and volunteer with No Flock for SoPo. He lives with his family in South Portland.

Until last week, South Portland Police collected tens of thousands of data points for ICE every day. Recently released records tell a dystopian story, and we still don’t have a full account of what happened.

South Portland’s Flock cameras, a type of technology called Automatic License Plate Recognition (or ALPRs), recorded the license plate and many other attributes of every vehicle that passed seven points on the west side of the city — including the Jetport, the Maine Mall, Cash Corner, and Red Bank — for over a year. Whether you lived in South Portland, worked here, drove through, or just visited to shop or board a flight, every one of your drives was logged.

Following a sustained community advocacy campaign, the South Portland City Council voted on June 11 to immediately end the use of Flock technology. It’s a critical step toward a safer community, but these cameras remain in use throughout Maine and America, and we still haven’t seen a thorough account of who South Portland Police allowed to access our data.

A summary of South Portland’s system revealed that over 600 agencies around the country had pre-approved, AI-powered access to our data, and more than 70 of those agencies have active collaboration agreements with ICE. Without public input, our police department generated heat maps of residents’ movements and shared that data with agencies trying to tear our community apart.

Records from the SPPD only get more terrifying when you dig into the specifics. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, of all things, was added as a “shared network” with South Portland. They’ve been deputized by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to perform ICE immigration enforcement, and have a history of performing nationwide lookups on behalf of ICE.

These same officials could effortlessly search for ICE targets in South Portland without a
warrant, or even a request, from their devices in Florida. South Portland claims that the Florida FWC had access to our data simply because it “operates ALPRs on the Flock reciprocal sharing network.” That’s not good enough.

SPPD’s data summary also revealed that law enforcement around America conducted millions of searches of South Portland’s images, including 1,800 searches with “explicit immigration-related terms” between February 2025 and April 2026.

South Portland will no longer use Flock cameras, but they remain in place. The cameras must be physically covered and removed immediately. Other Maine communities, including Lewiston, York and Auburn, continue to use Flock AI surveillance, and the problem is even more prominent in other parts of America. As a state and a country, we need to understand how these cameras are used and create new policies to protect our communities.

South Portland leadership can still show who has and hasn’t accessed our data. Flock’s system automatically logs every search of its system. Those records make up the Network Audit Log, which shows when each search was made, who made it, and what it was looking for.

South Portland claims that releasing the log would violate state law, but they came to this legal opinion only last week, after first delaying multiple Freedom of Access Act requests. If we want to move forward with intelligent, transparent and legal use of new technologies, we the people deserve a full account of what our government does with them.

Better yet, we need to craft new policies at the municipal and state levels to make sure that Maine communities aren’t suddenly and quietly subjected to venture-funded Big Brother tools.

Our police department loves to talk about “community policing,” and there are ample examples of officers doing tremendous outreach work. But if SPPD can’t prove that it didn’t collect information that directly aids ICE abductions, all of that great work will be outweighed by an enormous moral and political scandal.

The struggle against unjust mass surveillance in Maine and throughout the country has only just begun.