New Castle, PA Flock Contract

Who approved this?

No approval document for this contract has been found yet. The records request guide shows which office holds it.

New Castle Police run 2 Flock cameras, a Falcon license plate reader at Lowery Street and West Falls Street and a pan tilt zoom camera at West North Street Park, plus 29 Raven acoustic sensors, all inside census tract 42073000400, the city's only majority minority neighborhood. Footnote4a published that finding on May 18, 2026 using audit logs obtained through a Pennsylvania Right to Know request filed via MuckRock covering June 28, 2023 through April 27, 2026. The Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported on August 17, 2026 on a separate log set covering January 2024 through June 2026, in which outside agencies ran more than 11 million searches against New Castle data while local users ran just over 10,000. More than four in five of those searches carried no case number, about one in five gave reasons such as sus, atl or cj, and nearly 36,000 were labeled as tests on the live national database. Other agencies entered immigration or ICE as the reason for thousands of lookups even though Flock disables federal sharing by default. Footnote4a counted more than 300 network shares reaching over 100 agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and seven officers keeping personal hotlists holding 99 plates, only 4 of which carried a case number and 28 of which were set never to expire. New Castle was the only one of six Pennsylvania departments the Capital-Star asked that released its audit logs. No contract amount, term length, approving body or council vote is documented in either report.