Sikeston to double number of Flock cameras

SIKESTON, Mo. (KBSI) – The city of Sikeston will double the number of Flock cameras in the city.

The Sikeston City Council approved the addition of four Flock cameras on Monday. That makes the number of cameras in the city to eight.

Flock cameras are solar-powered, motion-activated, and infrastructure-free cameras. They can identify and categorize the details of vehicles that pass by, according to the city of Sikeston.

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 says 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 about $20,000 in recovered value, according to the city of Sikeston.

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

Capt. Smith says 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 also 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.

Related stories:

New camera technology supports law enforcement

Cape Girardeau Police Department to implement stolen vehicle locator system