Local County Has Message For New York Drivers About Its Cameras

Do you feel comfortable with license plate reader cameras in your community?

Amid growing national concern over Flock Safety surveillance cameras, Putnam County law enforcement wants residents to know something important.

Their License Plate Readers are not Flock Safety cameras, and they work very differently.

Putnam County Law Enforcement: Our License Plate Cameras Are Not Flock

The Putnam County Sheriff's Office is reassuring drivers that they are not part of a national network.

Sheriff Brian Hess, Carmel Police Chief Anthony Hoffmann, and Kent Police Chief Kevin Owens issued a joint statement this week explaining how the county's license plate reader network operates and why they say residents should not lump it in with the commercial camera networks drawing scrutiny across the country.

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It comes after reports of so-called Flock cameras, which store data on a private company's cloud and can be searched by thousands of agencies across the nation.

What Makes It Different

The county's cameras are not connected to any national commercial database. All data is stored on a government-owned server controlled by local law enforcement through a regional Real Time Crime Center partnership, with no third-party company involvement.

Only local law enforcement can access the data, and searching historical records requires an active criminal investigation. Records are deleted after two years in accordance with New York State standards.

"Our data sits on a government server controlled by law enforcement, right here in the region," Sheriff Hess said. "It is never sold, never shared with private companies, and never available to some nationwide search network."

The cameras photograph license plates only. No facial recognition. No ticketing. A plate that triggers no alert passes through.

What The Numbers Show In Putnam County

According to officials, from January 1 through August 11, 2026, the county's 21 fixed camera sites generated 808 alerts on 250 vehicles of interest. That includes 184 stolen vehicles, 27 known burglary crew vehicles, 22 vehicles tied to organized retail theft rings, and 17 vehicles linked to violent suspects, missing persons, or domestic violence cases.

Over five years of operation, the technology has helped identify a murder suspect who later confessed, intercept a violent suspect heading to harm a family member, solve an armed robbery with no witnesses, and locate missing and suicidal people before it was too late.

"Within three days of installing our first camera, we identified the vehicle and suspect in a daytime home burglary within hours," said Chief Owens of the Kent Police Department.