First Came the Pink Paint, Then Came Questions About Surveillance

Four unexplained pink markers appeared across Pine Plains on Tuesday, Feb. 3, unsettling residents and town officials and raising questions about whether surveillance equipment was being installed without local authorization. The markings — pink spray paint and wooden stakes placed on both public and private property — were later linked to Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that sells automated license-plate reader systems to police departments nationwide, prompting concern about who, if anyone, had approved the work and what kind of surveillance could follow.

One of the first people to notice the markings was Jeanine Sisco, a member of the Pine Plains Town Board, who on Tuesday spotted what appeared to be routine roadside work taking place across the street from her home near Patchin Mills, just north of the town center.

“I noticed a car and a traffic cone,” Sisco said. “They were spraying pink paint and driving stakes into the ground.”

At first, she said, it did not seem unusual. “I didn’t think anything of it, because there’s been a lot of stuff going on with wiring with Central Hudson,” she said.

But her husband, Keith, walked outside to ask what was happening.

“The individual said that he was with Flock Safety, and he was marking places where these devices would be installed,” Sisco said. The devices, Keith was told, were pole-mounted, solar-powered, license-plate reader cameras.

“They said they were actually installing one on my property,” Sisco recalled. “My husband said, ‘I have no knowledge of this, and this is private property.’”

By the end of the day, Flock Safety had marked three other locations near the center of Pine Plains — one adjacent to the firehouse sign on South Main Street, a second at 2991 Church St. across from St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, and a third along Route 83 in front of Heeler Farms.

Michael Carone, the owner of Heeler Farms, told the Herald that as of Thursday afternoon he was unaware of the marker and of any plans to install surveillance technology in front of his farm.

Paris Lewbel, a public relations manager for Flock Safety, said: “We don’t install on private property unless we have a contract with that property owner. If it’s a city, it would be on the city right-of-way. That’s where we would have permits or permission to be able to install those.”

As calls and messages began circulating among residents, local officials said they were trying to answer a basic question: Who, exactly, had authorized the work?

“I don’t exactly know what’s going on,” Town Supervisor Brian Walsh said on Wednesday. “I’m in the process of getting to the bottom of it.”

While Walsh said the Town of Pine Plains has no contract with Flock, he acknowledged being aware of discussions between the company and the Pine Plains Police Department months earlier, before the markings appeared.

“This whole thing started when Sgt. Beliveau was here,” Walsh said. 
“We are not in contract with anybody right now.”


Walsh said the last communication he had with Flock Safety was in June.

“It was originally proposed to me as a free six-month trial,” Walsh said. “Sgt. Beliveau was heading this whole thing up. And then he obviously retired and left and moved away.”

Sgt. Michael Beliveau, a 27-year law enforcement veteran, retired from the Pine Plains Police Department following a surgery last year. The Town Board approved his resignation in July.

“I’m not in charge. I’m a sergeant. I was a contact,” Beliveau told The Herald on Friday. “I was not the one who signed the paperwork.”

Beliveau said the approval to engage with Flock came from outside of the police department. “It has to,” he said.

“We don’t have the ability, as police officers, or sergeants, or first and second in charge of the department, to make any — and I can’t emphasize enough — any decisions in that police department without running it by our bosses,” Beliveau said.

On Thursday, Walsh said he had been in touch with Flock Safety. He said no Flock Safety equipment had been or would be installed.

“There are no Flock cameras going up in the town of Pine Plains,” Walsh said. “The markup was a mistake.”

Flock Safety sells surveillance cameras, drones, and automated license-plate reader systems to police departments, governments, homeowners associations, and businesses nationwide. In 2025 it was valued at $7.5 billion. Its systems typically consist of pole-mounted, solar-powered cameras that capture images of passing vehicles, convert license plates into digital data, and upload that information over cellular networks to a cloud platform. In addition to plate numbers, the system can search by what the company calls “vehicle fingerprints” — including vehicle make, model, or color — even when a plate is obscured or missing.

When asked if the Pine Plains Police Department or Town of Pine Plains had entered into an agreement with Flock Safety, Lewbel said, “I mean, it looks, you know, in my high-level thing … it looks like there was some sort of deal done. I just don’t know what it was. It’s not uncommon for Flock to work with cities and potentially have a small trial program for a city to try it out and see if it works for them.”

Walsh said he could not speak for Dutchess County or for any future plans involving county roads, including Route 83, where one of the surveillance markers appeared.

“I can’t answer for the county. I can’t answer for the future with the county,” Walsh said. “I believe there’s been discussions with the DA and the sheriff’s office on something about their crime prevention program about putting cameras up, but the town of Pine Plains is not putting cameras up.”

Two other members of the Town Board, Trevor Roush and Kevin Walsh, were unaware of any trial or plan to install surveillance cameras until contacted by the Herald. A third, Murphy Birdsall, said she had only learned about Flock from Keith Sisco.

“My immediate reaction was ICE,” Birdsall said. “Given the times, that was my reaction.”

“I sure as hell don’t want those things in Pine Plains,” Kevin Walsh said. “Even on private property, I have a problem with it because the way that it’s connected and it allows the police to use a level of surveillance that they’re not normally authorized without warrants.”

A sales representative from Flock Safety told the Herald that whoever owns the equipment is ultimately responsible for sharing, or not sharing, the data collected and stored in its cloud system.

However, a Feb. 3 report from the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that data collected from Flock Safety devices owned by the Mountain View Police Department in California was accessed by four federal agencies without the permission of the department.

“We both agreed that nothing like this will happen or will go forward in our town,” Sisco said after speaking with Brian Walsh. “Nothing like this could ever be approved unless it came before the Town Board, and unless it was something that the community was completely aware of and in support of.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comments from Michael Beliveau, the former Pine Plains police sergeant, who responded to the Herald’s request for comment four hours after the story was published.