As communities across the U.S. grapple with the rapid spread of Flock cameras and questions about who can access the data they collect, a new study from a University of Massachusetts Amherst public policy researcher reframes the debate to ask a more basic question: Does the technology serve the public?
The study, published in the journal Cities , examines facial recognition technology in Portland, Oregon and autonomous vehicles in Tempe, Arizona to show how communities can weigh the promised benefits of emerging technologies against risks to values such as privacy, equity, transparency and civil liberties. The researchers employ “public value mapping”—a way for governments and the people they serve to look at what a technology is designed to accomplish and weigh it against what else it may change.
The approach takes on added significance as Flock cameras—automated license plate readers used by law enforcement and communities—have become a flashpoint over privacy, surveillance and policing.
Study senior author Thaddeus Miller , professor of public policy at UMass Amherst, says the technologies they investigated in the research were emerging more slowly when the work began before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the pace has accelerated.
“These technologies, like facial recognition and Flock, were emerging in baby steps then, and the pace has only ramped up,” Miller observes.
That acceleration, he says, can put cities and towns in a difficult position. Municipalities face pressure from technology companies and law enforcement to adopt systems that promise improvements in public safety, efficiency or other goals, in many cases, without the staff or expertise to understand the trade-offs.
“Those local governments often do not have the capacity or sometimes the expertise to think through how emerging technologies might affect a whole set of values that the community may have,” Miller explains.
A city might adopt a surveillance system to fight crime, for example, without fully considering its implications for privacy, freedom of expression, racial equity or how information could be shared beyond the agency that collected it.
The Portland case illustrates those tensions. Researchers found that facial recognition cameras could offer public-safety benefits, but there was significant uncertainty about the extent of those benefits in an urban environment. At the same time, there were documented concerns about racial and gender bias, the accuracy of the technology and a lack of transparency about how data would be collected, managed and shared.
Ultimately, Portland’s response was to ban facial recognition technology in public spaces. The case demonstrates that technologies marketed as inevitable can be constrained when the community evaluates them through the lens of public values.
Miller cautions that public value mapping is not a scorecard that automatically tells a community whether to approve or reject a technology. Instead, it is intended to bring government officials and residents together to identify what they value, examine potential benefits and harms, and consider what policies could produce a better outcome.
In the Flock debate, that could mean asking questions before debating the pros and cons of the cameras themselves. For instance: What public safety problems exist? What privacy sacrifices are people willing to accept? Who controls the data? How long is it retained? Who can access it? And, do the answers align with the community’s stated values?
The study asserts that those conversations should take place across government silos and with the public before a controversy erupts.
Miller says the goal is not to reject innovation, but to approach it in a deliberate manner, where there’s time to ensure technological advancements do not come at the expense of values a community is trying to protect.
Technology, he says, is not destiny. Communities can have a say in how it is adopted, regulated and used.
“We shape technologies every day in all sorts of ways,” Miller adds. “The question is, can we do so with more intention?”
The paper was co-authored by Farah Najar Arevalo, of Arizona State University, and Devon McAslan, of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Cities
Public value mapping in the smart city: Assessing emerging urban technologies
18-Aug-2026