University of Michigan Secretly Signed $127,500 AI Surveillance Contract for 15 Falcon Cameras

ANN ARBOR — University of Michigan police entered into an unannounced $127,500 agreement with surveillance firm Flock Safety to acquire artificial intelligence-powered licence plate readers, procurement records released under public records disclosure confirm.

Not a single camera was ever switched on.

The contract, executed on February 3, 2025, bound the university to an initial two-year cycle at $63,750 annually for 15 law-enforcement-grade "Falcon Flex" cameras. Jennifer Carr, a procurement agent for the university, authorized the purchase on behalf of the University of Michigan Police Department. Mark Smith, general counsel for Flock Safety, signed for the vendor. Campus police now acknowledge the tactical hardware was never deployed onto university grounds, though official records leave unresolved whether the university disbursed any public funds under the agreement.

Vehicle Fingerprinting and Broad Search Mandates

Each unit was designed as a rear-facing scanner capable of cataloguing passing vehicles without monitoring pedestrian footpaths or sidewalks. Yet the technology under the contract extends far beyond simple optical character recognition. The hardware operates in tandem with Flock's "Vehicle Fingerprint" artificial intelligence system, which logs distinctive vehicle attributes including exterior damage, bumper stickers, roof racks, make, and colour to construct searchable movement histories across space and time.

Section 1.14 of the contract authorized camera deployment for any "legitimate public safety and/or business purpose" — explicitly including the "prevention of commercial harm." It specified zero geographic installation limits across the Ann Arbor footprint.

The data pipeline carried sweeping inter-agency access. The platform offered UMPD access to statewide and nationwide tracking databases alongside Flock's "Community Network" of privately operated cameras, operating under reciprocal terms that could permit outside police and private entities to search university-held vehicle captures.

Under Section 5.3, the agreement permitted Flock to transfer captured imagery directly to law enforcement, external government bodies, or third parties without a court warrant whenever the corporation maintained a "good faith belief" that disclosure was legally warranted. The contract established an automatic 30-day footage deletion schedule unless campus police manually archived the records, though Flock has separately shifted its baseline platform retention limit down to seven days.

Systematic Rollback of Campus Oversight Safeguards

The covert procurement surfaced amidst an aggressive physical security buildout across the university's footprint.

During the summer of 2025, the Division of Public Safety and Security fixed surveillance lenses across building entrances, the Diag, and the historic Law Quad. That infrastructure push followed sustained student demonstrations concerning the Gaza war throughout the 2024–2025 academic calendar, during which university officers repeatedly deployed physical force against demonstrators.

Bandwidth expanded rapidly in the autumn of 2025. The administration formally rolled out the Security Technology Enhancement Project to overhaul security apparatus across all three university campuses — Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint.

Yet regulatory guardrails dropped as the network expanded. University leadership stripped institutional policy of clear limits on camera operation while discarding longstanding statutory mandates for a joint student-faculty surveillance oversight committee, a body that had already stopped convening its mandated sessions.

Campus administrators face mounting scrutiny over the total cost of the aborted procurement, as student governing assemblies prepare formal inquiries regarding whether Flock Safety retains any active digital access to University of Michigan network infrastructure.