Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
With Flock Safety cameras stirring up controversy statewide and the City of Olympia recently suspending use of the program, Rob Carlson, Yelm police chief, deemed use of the surveillance equipment as successful and productive for the Yelm Police Department (YPD) — but he understands concerns with it.
According to Carlson, YPD began using the Flock Safety system in 2024 with four initial cameras. He noted the use of the first four cameras in Yelm was “absolutely successful.”
“Right off the bat, we were seeing the positives — constantly getting hits,” Carlson said. “What the system is, is basically a stationary license plate reader. It takes pictures of cars as they drive away from the camera, so we get the back picture of the rear end of a vehicle. That license plate gets read by the system.”
He added, when YPD runs a license plate or uses dispatch to run a vehicle’s plate number, the information is checked nationally and locally to make sure there are no active warrants, no missing persons associated with the vehicle, and no Amber Alert or Silver Alert correlated with the car.
“In the system, we can actually choose the system to tell us what alerts we want to have happen. It’s not going to tell us if the person has a suspended driver’s license. It’s not going to tell us if the vehicle’s registration has expired,” Carlson said. “It’s basically just going to alert our officers, to their cellphones on an app, that the vehicle’s license plate is stolen or that the vehicle is stolen, or if that vehicle is associated with an Amber Alert or a Silver Alert, or if it that vehicle is wanted for a specific type of crime in another jurisdiction. Our officers get that alert. They’ll go out to the location, knowing which camera got them, and they’ll go to the area to see if they can find the vehicle.”
YPD added four additional Flock Safety cameras in 2025, with Yelm City Council approval, bringing the total number of units to eight in the area.
“I can honestly say that since we’ve had those cameras, it’s been 100% effective and as advertised through Flock,” Carlson said. “We’ve had no one get into our system that shouldn’t be in our system. The system hasn’t been hacked. It doesn’t do facial recognition. All the vehicles that go through there that aren’t associated with a crime purges after 30 days. The system purges everything after 30 days if it’s not associated with a case or crime.”
Any ongoing criminal incident in Yelm, according to Carlson, can be tracked through Flock Safety — if there’s a vehicle involved — to search for and find suspects or witnesses.
“We had that shooting at Sea Mar not too long ago. The Flock system was a huge part in finding the suspect’s vehicle in that,” Carlson said. “In fact, that Flock system helped us find some witnesses in that shooting. It’s been hugely successful, and for us, our officers are out doing the best that they can. We’re a smaller agency, so obviously we cannot be everywhere. Those cameras help us in doing our job — to actually go out and make sure the people coming into our community should actually be in our community. Or, if people are coming into our community and need our help, we can give them that help — whether it’s Amber or Silver Alerts.”
While Carlson knows how important the technology has been to YPD, he said he also understands and “completely respects and totally gets” why community members would be concerned with the use of the equipment.
“Through Flock, they’ve been very diligent in giving us information in regards to the information that’s being put out that’s negative about Flock,” Carlson said. “I can tell whoever goes into our system. We can track who puts any information in. Our policy in using Flock, if an officer goes into Flock and wants to check out if his brother was in town and puts their vehicle into the system, you have to have a case number associated with that vehicle. There has to be an active law enforcement investigation associated with that search. If there’s not, it will not let you search.”
Additionally, Carlson described YPD’s position on forcing immigration laws and stated his commitment to following state laws.
“We don’t enforce immigration laws. I believe it was in 2019, the state of Washington, we have a law that says we can’t assist in immigration. So we don’t,” Carlson said. “Everyone we share our system with currently is in Washington state because we know they follow that same rule that we have to follow. If the federal government contacts us and wants to search our system, they have to have a reason for searching that has to be under the same standards that we’ve been searching under. It has to be a criminal investigation. We’ve never had that happen though.
“I guess I get the concern in regards to overreach, and that’s we’re tracking people. We wouldn’t track anybody unless they’re associated with a crime. That’s what the system is for. We’re not going to track average people who are going about their day-to-day,” he continued. We have a WSDOT camera that sits at Yelm and 1st and takes live footage of everyone driving through Yelm. We have cameras on all the businesses — Safeway and Walmart. Everywhere you go you’re being tracked — your cell phone, your vehicles.”
Carlson added that there’s a restriction of usage in YPD’s Flock Safety system, and stated the department owns that data. Though they use the camera equipment to record the surveillance, he echoed that the department possesses that information.
“We dictate who goes in our system. Our officers are bound by policy,” he said.
