Crystal Police Chief Reflects on Flock Camera Removal, Community Feedback

After the Crystal Police Department removed their six Flock automatic license plate readers from the city, Chief Brian Hubbard said the department has no plans to replace the cameras with a different system.

Crystal police held a community meeting on Sept. 2, where officers highlighted the successes they’ve seen using the Flock ALPR system. Community members then spent about an hour and a half asking questions and sharing concerns about the system.

One week later, on Sept. 9, the cameras were taken down.

CCX News spoke with Hubbard after the removal. He said every decision he makes is a cost-benefit one.

In this case, the cost of community trust outweighed the system’s crime-solving tool benefits. He also felt the concerns had some urgency to them, based on the feedback his department heard.

“ALPRs have proven themselves to be a good tool for us in solving crimes, for sure. And we’ve had good success in the short period of time that we’ve used them,” Hubbard said. “If we have a community perception, at some level, where people feel they are less safe because of this, then, we go back to what we were doing before: which is work aggressively to solve as many crimes as we can, as best we can with the tools we have available.”

Chief Hubbard speaks to CCX Media at his office in Crystal.

What’s Next and How We Got Here

There is no “next” right now, in terms of ALPR technology, Hubbard said. Moving forward, he said when new tools, programs and technologies come into the community, he’d want to figure out a way to engage the community on the front end. At this point, there are no plans to look at another tool.

Hubbard said ALPRs have been around for many years and the first iteration Crystal had was in the mid-2010s. At that time, the ALPRs they used were mounted on squad cars. Crystal got access to other cities’ data in 2024, and got their own cameras in 2025.

In the last month or so, Hubbard said he’d begun to hear more positive and negative feedback from the community on the cameras and decided to hold a meeting to take in feedback directly. They also shared data on how the system was used to fight crimes.

“Because this technology has been around for awhile and we’ve been using it, I didn’t think anything of it. This was just a good piece of technology for fighting crime,” Hubbard explained. “That’s my response to ‘Why didn’t we have the conversation ahead of time’ – because I didn’t even recognize that it was a conversation to be had.”

At the Sept. 2 meeting, everyone who spoke voiced their concerns — including resident Brady O’Rourke, who had put in a public records request for Flock data. Hubbard said he was grateful for the conversation.

“The discord, and the respect, and the successful back-and-forth in that meeting was really helpful,” Hubbard said. “I think that says a lot about our community.”

The cameras have all been fully removed from the city of Crystal and are now in storage. Hubbard said the department is in the process of returning them now.

Crystal Resident Brady O’Rourke holds up a sign that serves a dual purpose– promoting his website and blocking the Flock ALPR. The ALPR on West Broadway has since been removed.

Crystal