DPS TO DOUBLE NUMBER OF FLOCK CAMERAS IN SIKESTON

(Aug. 1, 2023) – The City of Sikeston will double the number of Flock cameras in the city.

On Monday, Sikeston City Council approved the addition of four Flock cameras, moving the number of cameras in the city to eight.

Flock cameras are solar-powered, motion-activated, and infrastructure-free cameras that can identify and categorize the details of vehicles that pass by. The Flock system is designed to identify license plates associated with crimes, including wanted suspects and stolen vehicles.

Sikeston Department of Public Safety Capt. Ryan Smith said the cameras have proven to be useful with investigations and recoveries that may have otherwise gone undetected.

Since the initial four cameras went online June 9, they have led to the direct recovery of two stolen vehicles and two stolen license plates, totaling approximately $20,000 in recovered value.

The system directly contributed to the locating of a missing person as well as a person with an active felony arrest warrant. Officers successfully used the system to locate a suspect involved in the leaving the scene of an accident. With the information received from the Flock system, the officer identified the suspect and cleared the report that resulted in a felony amount of damage to a vehicle.

Smith said in a four-week span, the four cameras logged 523,584 scans. He said they could break that down to unique license plates, which looks at each vehicle just one time.

“You can drive through all four of our LPRs, multiple times in one day, multiple times in that month, and it is still just going to count it one time,” Smith said. “In a four-week period, it scanned a little over 90,000 vehicles. Those four LPRs are pretty busy and doing a good job for us so far.”

The data is kept by the system for 30 days.

The Flock system allows law enforcement agencies to share data with other law enforcement agencies who have the system. Since the approval of the initial four cameras, at least three other local police departments have begun the process of purchasing and installing Flock cameras in their jurisdiction as well, helping Sikeston DPS obtain access to the data captured by those cameras.