District Attorney details unified surveillance system

The Dutchess County Real-Time Crime Center, which came online over the course of the past year, is being hailed as a first-of-its-kind collaboration between county, state and local law enforcement agencies, District Attorney Anthony Parisi told The News on Friday, Nov. 6.

Real-time crime centers are emerging nationwide as powerful surveillance tools. They link networks of government, business and privately owned security cameras into centralized systems accessible to police. These centers often employ artificial intelligence technologies such as facial recognition, license plate scanning and video analysis that can compress hours of footage into minutes of usable data.

Dutchess County’s new center — officially called the Analysis & Real-Time Crime Intelligence Center, or ARTCIC — brings those capabilities under one roof for use by the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office, New York State Police and local departments.

“This is really one of the first collaborations of all agencies into a single project, a single real-time crime center,” Parisi said.

Among the vendors supplying equipment and software is Flock Safety, a rapidly growing company that produces license plate readers and AI-driven video systems designed to detect suspicious activity and alert law enforcement.

Parisi said the cameras process video on site, using artificial intelligence to identify possible threats such as a firearm on school grounds or a crime in progress. Alerts are sent directly to the center’s analysts, who review the footage and dispatch officers as needed.

Flock’s software platform, FlockOS, serves as the backbone of the Dutchess system, connecting camera feeds from across the county and processing that video in real time, generating data that law enforcement can search to track people and vehicles across wide areas.

According to the company’s website, FlockOS is now used by thousands of law enforcement and public safety agencies nationwide. Its widespread adoption, however, has drawn criticism from privacy advocates.

Use of the products has come under scrutiny amid concerns about data security and allegations that unrelated agencies — including federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and police departments in other states — have been able to access local law enforcement data without warrants, and in some cases potentially violating state privacy laws.

In May 2025, the tech outlet 404 Media reported that Flock data stored by local law enforcement had been accessed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents through informal “side door” requests. The report also cited a Texas case in which police allegedly searched the national Flock database to track a woman who had an abortion, noting that officers recorded the reason as “had an abortion, search for female.”

Following that report, several police departments in Washington State suspended use of Flock’s system. The company responded in June, saying it had restricted access to databases in Washington, Illinois, California and Virginia to comply with local data privacy laws. Flock also disputed the reporting, stating its audits found “not a single credible case of law enforcement using the system to locate vulnerable women seeking healthcare.” The company said the Texas case involved a missing person investigation, not a criminal probe.

Parisi stressed that Dutchess County’s data remains under local control.

“We own our data and we control our data,” he said. “No one can have access to our data outside of the people we give access to.”

The News has submitted public records requests for Flock search data to both the Dutchess County Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office, which have not yet been fulfilled.

Parisi said crime prevention was a major motivation for creating the center, describing it as a tool to help law enforcement act proactively rather than reactively. He added that transparency and public engagement are priorities for his office, and said a public-facing transparency portal is planned.

Those initiatives have yet to materialize. As of early November, the Dutchess County government website contains no mention of the real-time crime center, its policies or community outreach programs. The only public statement remains a November 2024 announcement of grant funding to establish the center.

The District Attorney’s independent website, dutchessda.org, uses the CRIMEWATCH platform to share information online. The site includes a link under “ARTCIC – Analysis & Real-Time Crime Intelligence Center” that redirects visitors to a Flock Safety-maintained page, where residents and businesses can register private security cameras to the county network.

Parisi has discussed the center with The Daily Catch in Red Hook, New York, but no other area media outlets have reported on the center since the county received the grants last year. Local stakeholders told The News that they had little to no knowledge of the Real-Time Crime Center.

Parisi admitted his office has had some trouble drumming up community interest in the program.

“I think I was somewhat naive in how much interest I thought the community would have in being a part of those types of projects,” he said. “There really hasn’t been the interest that I thought there would be.”