Birds on the Wire: The Silent Spread of Malden's Invisible Street Watchers

Next time you drive through one of Malden's high-traffic intersections, take a moment to look up. Perched quietly on grey utility poles, alongside traffic signals and streetlights, you may see these technological "birds on the wire." They do not chirp, and they do not move. Instead, equipped with heavy-duty solar panels and distinct, stacked black external battery packs, Flock Safety cameras silently watch, capturing and cataloging movements frame by frame, vehicle by vehicle, day and night.

Ask local officials responsible for overseeing this growing digital dragnet a simple, two-question "Civil Freedoms Trivia" pop-quiz (the response may be a blank stare):

1. How many Flock cameras are currently operational on Malden's streets?
2. Can you name the locations of any three of them?

Answers from our municipal decision-makers may range from "I don't know" to "We only have a small number." And then a troubling reality sets in: if our own elected leaders do not know how many surveillance eyes are watching our streets, how can they possibly ensure our constitutional right to privacy is being protected?

We were in contact with residents who shared concerns about the use of Flock cameras, and we scoured what public information we could find. We reached out to At Large Councillor Karen Colón Hayes, who was responsive and helpful. She has spoken with a number of residents on this topic, and been contacted by others. She has also interacted with MPD to discuss the topic of Flock cameras, and she helpfully provided us with a number of documents she had readily available, including some used in this article.

The Paper Trail vs. The Missing Records

Through our ongoing public records investigation, MNN has begun piecing together a story of rapid, quiet expansion. A review of the city's internal financial ledgers from March 2023 through late 2025 reveals a total expenditure of $112,712.33 paid to Atlanta-based surveillance giant Flock Group Inc. After the initial installation fees washed out, it appears Malden locked itself into a flat, recurring annual subscription of $30,500.

Using assumptions of standard industry pricing — where sources indicate a single camera lease runs roughly $2,500 to $3,000 annually — our back-of-the-envelope calculations put Malden's Flock fleet at somewhere between 10 and 12 operational cameras, depending on which pricing tier applies. That range, not a single number, is what the math actually supports; the invoices themselves don't break down a price per camera, so this is an estimate, not a count.

Public-facing records remain riddled with holes regardless of the exact number. While crowd-sourced platforms like "DeFlock" have physically mapped only about six camera locations for Malden, a local activist was verbally told by police representatives that the count is actually twelve — a claim we can't independently verify, but one that, if accurate, would mean twice as many cameras exist as the public can currently locate on sources we reviewed.

The answer to why these camera count figures don't match may lie in a systemic lack of administrative transparency. Our review of the city's Police Community Advisory Committee (PCAC) records reveals a pattern of missing information. The official minutes for the February 18, 2026 PCAC meeting note that an MPD detective "provided an overview of what Flock cameras are, numbers of cameras in Malden and how the MPD uses them." No number appears in the written minutes. (Malden's Police Community Advisory Committee, or PCAC, is scheduled to meet 7/15/26. For the five prior meetings of 2026, only one meeting has minutes published. For the ten meetings of 2025, only half have published minutes. At one meeting, the number of cameras was reported disclosed, but not recorded in the minutes. Other key topics were apparently not discussed at all, as one attendee told us: 'and no, we didn't discuss exact locations unfortunately.'

One admission did surface, buried in a Q&A document the city itself produced with the February 18, 2026 meeting minutes: MPD was asked whether Malden's Flock data was shared with an out-of-state agency — specifically, Boulder, Colorado. That information was reported based on a network audit surfacing the Boulder connection. MPD's answer, verbatim: "Early on in obtaining Flock cameras, sharing access was allowed between other states. Confirming at date of question that MPD no longer shares out of state, only within MA." Present-tense reassurances about Massachusetts-only sharing don't account for what happened before today, or how residents would have found out if a network audit hadn't.

To plug these public information holes, MNN has filed formal a public records request seeking the release of the raw "Network Audit" and "Organizational Audit" logs. If released, these logs are expected to show exactly how many cameras exist, where they are, and who is accessing our data. Other requests have been submitted by other requestors. Malden's response to one prior request stated the "Town decided not to make response documents public" — an assertion that sits uneasily next to the public records law's presumption that municipal records are public unless a specific exemption applies.

That second camera is worth pausing on. Flock is not the only surveillance apparatus watching this intersection, or, possibly, others in Malden — it's simply the one that's drawn public attention. An older, higher-end system at the same location arrived with essentially no fanfare and no comparable public reckoning. If a taxpayer-funded camera can sit on a pole for years without residents knowing who paid for it or why, that's not a Flock-specific problem. It's a pattern.

Zero Physical Disclosure: Silent Surveillance

Walk or drive past any of the six locations we have identified — including a conspicuous cluster of cameras at one of our busiest local intersections — and you may miss it. We have seen no signage such as decals, warning labels, or public notices. By contrast, if a private business or resident records public space, they commonly mount warning signs (e.g., "Premises Under Video Surveillance"). Without physical disclosure, the city is maintaining a passive dragnet: consent is entirely bypassed, and residents cannot opt out of having their movements logged simply by driving down a public Malden street.

The Hidden Cost of the Dragnet

While the $112,712.33 paper trail is stark, it represents only the visible part of the cost. Standard Flock deployments involve overhead never itemized on a vendor invoice:

• Permit fees: structural review and utility pole licensing fees.
• Officer labor hours: taxpayer dollars spent on the "ALPR Administrator" and officers managing "Hot Lists," attending training, and executing manual audits.
• The subscription trap: because Flock operates on a software-as-a-service model, Malden owns none of the hardware. If the city stops paying the $30,500 annual fee, the cameras are removed — a permanent, recurring drain rather than a one-time purchase.

The Usefulness Void: Missing Metrics

The Malden Police Department's public materials seem to focus heavily on the theoretical benefits of the cameras but have provided no localized, empirical data on actual local outcomes. How many of the images captured in Malden have actually contributed to solving a crime local to Malden? Without that accounting, it isn't possible to weigh the program's real-world results against its cost.

The Danger of False Positives

Automated license plate readers are not foolproof — they can misread characters or match an out-of-state plate to an unrelated "hot list" entry. In other municipalities, errors like these have led to high-risk stops of innocent people. Malden's policy requires an officer to visually confirm a plate before acting on a match, but without public audit logs, there's no way for residents to know how often that safeguard has actually been the only thing standing between a computer error and a stop.

The Permanent Data Trap

City officials point to a 30-day data retention policy as a privacy safeguard. What that framing leaves out: under Flock Safety's own Terms and Conditions (last revised February 2026), Flock grants itself a broader license to use captured customer data to "support and improve" its systems. Even if Malden dropped the program tomorrow, the company retains rights to data already collected — a private, out-of-state corporation holding a claim on Malden residents' travel history that the city's own retention policy doesn't reach.

The comparison isn't hypothetical. In June 2023, MNN reported that the Mayor's Office was hiring a taxpayer-funded staffer whose job description included monitoring social media for "constituent questions or concerns" — a digital counterpart to the physical dragnet now expanding across Malden's streets.

What MPD Says, In Its Own Words

MPD has been willing to explain its side. Police Chief Glenn T. Cronin sent the City Council a detailed myth-versus-fact letter on how Flock's technology works. The department fielded live community questions at the February 2026 PCAC meeting. Related documents are reproduced in full below rather than summarized, so readers can judge MPD's own framing directly rather than through MNN's paraphrase. The core claims: cameras capture only a single point-in-time image of a vehicle's rear, not continuous tracking; no facial recognition; no personally identifiable information collected; data-sharing outside Massachusetts law enforcement requires the department's own choice to enable it; and access within MPD is restricted, logged, and requires supervisor approval for uniformed officers.

Open Records Requests

MNN's public records project for transparency on this topic is ongoing. As of this writing, a number of public records requests have been submitted by multiple individuals and organizations:

• #2026-0300 (filed 7/14/26, open) — seeking an export of all images as maintained and in their native format specifically including all metadata from all FLOCK SAFETY cameras from June 23, 2026.
• #2026-0299 (filed 7/14/26, open) — seeking the records provided in response to Request #2026-0050, after the city stated it had "decided not to make response documents public."
• #2026-0298 (filed 7/13/26, open) — seeking all searchable city records since January 1, 2026 containing "Flock Safety," including contracts, agreements, and correspondence.
• #2026-0270 (filed 6/22/26, open) — seeking the raw Network Audit and Organizational Audit logs directly from Flock's platform, in original machine-readable format.
• #2026-0078 (filed 2/17/26, closed) — returned one PDF of Flock invoices, 2023–2026 — the basis for the financial figures in this piece.
• #2026-0050 (filed 1/26/26, closed) — seeking the same audit logs as #2026-0270, plus MPD's written Flock policies; the city's full response was that it "decided not to make response documents public."

References and Further Reading

• Mapping Flock Cameras in Malden, MA at https://deflock.org
• Google Maps Street View at https://www.google.com/maps/
• 6/25/23, June 15, 2023 job posting:Is the Mayor’s Office hiring a taxpayer funded staffer to track your social media activity? https://www.facebook.com/MaldenNewsNetwork/posts/pfbid0emuGteQdVKw9sVzFZ9dresX6SBd6B6mUVogVzzT4wngg8PxYiGD8NN9HEFWT7fHEl
• 6/24/26 What is Flock Safety? https://www.facebook.com/MaldenNewsNetwork/posts/pfbid0Uzh1aF3HubXKeVvSrZ6ThyaMWBYXpJeesbusFqVG5Q43PstzkyFGHkfdAvpTAc1l
• 6/26/26 Backlash Against Cameras Watching Your Cars https://www.facebook.com/MaldenNewsNetwork/posts/pfbid02BsPyf2pcuSr6AborGXpCxH2ccjbha4aviDn6dyJFag2BS1VfheekYgvcMHUonRJ3l
• LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire, citing ‘serious concerns’ over civil liberties and privacy, Zack Whittaker, July 13, 2026 https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/lapd-lets-contract-with-surveillance-giant-flock-expire-citing-serious-concerns-over-civil-liberties-and-privacy/
• City Council Terminates ALPR Contract with Flock Safety: Mountain View’s automated license plate reader cameras have been turned off since Feb. 2, Post Date:02/25/2026, https://www.mountainview.gov/Home/Components/News/News/1211/284
• Controversial Flock Cameras to be Removed from South Portland Amid Privacy Concerns and Republican Push to Ban Them Statewide, By Seamus Othot, June 16, 2026 https://www.themainewire.com/2026/06/controversial-flock-cameras-to-be-removed-from-south-portland-amid-privacy-concerns-and-republican-push-to-ban-them-statewide/
• Jason Koebler, Dec 22, 2025 Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet. https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/
• How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over ‘Stolen’ Plates, Joel Feder, Published Jul 8, 2026 https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-tracked-me-for-days-over-stolen-plates-and-sent-police-after-me
• City of Malden Agenda Center, Police Community Advisory Committee https://www.cityofmalden.org/AgendaCenter/

Malden News Network will continue to watch the "birds on the wire" and report on what these outstanding requests turn up. This is a complex topic with limited publicly available information, and we will continue to pursue the story as new information becomes available. If you have information, corrections or questions about Malden's Flock cameras, please reach out to us in the comments section of our Facebook page or via email at MaldenNewsNetwork@gmail.com.