The Church Hill professor who's clocking Flock

Church Hill was Flock-free when Steven Keener first moved in nine years ago. It didn’t stay that way.

“I remember the first one I noticed was at Libby Hill,” he told The Lookout in a phone interview. “Now there’s one right on Chimborazo Park that we walk by every day, there's the one by the school, there's actually one now right on [North] 35th Street, so if I'm, like, heading out to the Cap Trail for a run or something, I’ll pass it every time.”

The cylindrical devices, tucked under small solar panels and perched atop slim, black posts on public rights of way, are part of a surveillance network operated by the Richmond Police Department under contract with Flock Safety. The controversial Atlanta-based tech firm produces automated license-plate readers (ALPRs), gunshot detectors, and artificial intelligence-powered software that enables users to quickly locate and track cars and their drivers across Richmond and throughout the state.²

Keener is not the only Church Hill resident to notice the sudden appearance of Flock devices in the neighborhood, nor the only one concerned about the consequences of increased and interconnected government surveillance here. But as the co-founder and inaugural director of the Center for Crime, Equity, and Justice Research and Policy at Christopher Newport University, where he also teaches courses on crime and mental health an assistant professor, his interest in why they’d been placed here is both personal and professional.

“It was weird, as I was driving to these legislative fights about this, I’m passing multiple of these [ALPRs] along the way in my own neighborhood,” he said.

In January, Keener and two coauthors published a first-of-its-kind study to understand how other Virginia police departments place ALPRs in relation to factors like crime rate, poverty, and race. By comparing United States Census records and other demographic data to the map of various Hampton Roads’ police departments’ Flock networks—unsealed by a federal judge as part of an ongoing court case in Norfolk over the constitutionality of such networks—the researchers were able to calculate the rate at which poorer, Blacker neighborhoods were being surveilled compared to wealthier, whiter ones. (RPD has not disclosed the locations of the ~100 Flock ALPRs it operates in the city.)

“My colleague, who's a geographer that does a lot of work with [geographic information systems], texted me, ‘Hey, I've already started mapping these, and there's something here, we need to talk,’” recalled Keener, who arrived in Richmond in 2012 to attend a graduate program at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Wilder School, eventually earning a doctorate in public policy and administration. “He showed me the maps and and I saw right away. It’s obvious to the eye.”

The team found that of the 10 Hampton Roads census tracts with the most Flock cameras, eight of them have majority-Black populations. High-poverty neighborhoods in Hampton Roads have more than double the number of these ALPRs as low-poverty ones.

Responding to media coverage of the CNU study, some police departments in the region framed this disparity as a matter of simply focusing resources on areas with the most crime. But Keener, who also teaches courses on mental health and criminal justice at CNU, told The Lookout that his team’s currently underway follow-up research casts doubt on that assertion, too.

“The [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] actually reports homicide, overdoses, and some various crime data at the census-tract level, so we can plug it into our models,” he explained. When they did, they found that not only were the CDC’s crime data less predictive of Flock ALPR placements in Hampton Roads than race and class—they were fully negative predictors. “I cannot emphasize how surprised I was,” he said.

With the city’s contracts for Flock’s gunshot detectors and ALPRs set to expire later this year,³ RPD officials have signaled they would like to renew them, casting them as a vital tool for solving crimes quickly and efficiently. But as a numbers guy, Keener is dubious. “There is not actual data behind this,” he said. If RPD’s Flock locations were publicly available, he added, he and his co-authors could perform a similar analysis to the one it did with the data Hampton Roads police departments were mandated to release. Without that raw data, RPD’s Flock use is a black box to the CNU team. “I just don't buy that it’s really this magical efficiency tool” for solving crime, said Keener.

Researchers across the country have struggled similarly to obtain reliable information about how thousands of law-enforcement agencies across the country use (and in some cases, abuse) Flock’s interconnected surveillance network, and how it is facilitating the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. But in Church Hill, Keener is undeterred.

“We're not done on this,” he said. “We're all in […] more and more stuff's going to be coming out, and if we can actually get access to more data, we'll get even deeper.”

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

🐰 Get a load of this well-traveled Lionshead

Courtesy of Lookout reader Sarah Schoenfeld, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

As a reminder, East End Animal Friend is a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

🚦 Actually, E. Main camera still isn't issuing tickets, city says

File this one under “what happens when you assume.” A couple days after publishing my most recent column noting that the traffic camera monitoring the intersection at E. Main and N. 25th Sts. would finally begin issuing real tickets to red-light runners, I got an email from Ross Catrow, the city’s director of the office of strategic communications. Turns out, that camera—one of 10 that the city originally announced way back in September 2025, and the first of four in the initial round of installations—was not actually enabled to issue $50 fines starting March 1st like The Lookout at other local outlets reported.

The reason? Somebody at the city decided to extend the 30-day grace period (during which the camera issued only warnings) through March 8th “due to the winter storms,” Catrow said. He added that the grace period on two of the other first-round red-light cameras had “just started,” and would conclude towards the end of this month, contra the previously reported timeline that would have had them spitting out fines starting at the beginning of this month. I followed up for more details on who made the decision to delay the E. Main / N. 25th camera, what the storm had to do with it, and why the rollout was taking so long, generally. Catrow acknowledged those questions, but did not respond substantively before deadline.¹ I will update this item if/when he does.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Tune in: Scout is playing at Triple Crossing Beer’s Fulton Fridays event right now (music started at 6pm, sorry for the late notice). Happy hour ‘til 7pm though! Details.

• Screen it: Second Arrow is running a free injury-prevention screening and physical-therapy clinic tomorrow (3/7) from 10:30am-12pm. Info here. 

• Spin it: Vinyl Night is back at Pizza Bones/Friend Bar tomorrow night from 9pm-12am, with Talal Abbas and Neil McCarthy manning the steel wheels. Check the flyer.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

1  In fairness, he warned me in an email Tuesday that the Avula administration’s impending budget introduction might get in the way. “A lot of us are single-mindedly focused” on it, he said.

2  Last summer, Virginia lawmakers passed a rule prohibiting Commonwealth cops from sharing their footage with federal agencies or across state lines, but a recent report from the Virginia State Crime Commission indicates some departments have already violated those rules.

3  March 18th and June 30th, respectively.