On an early fall afternoon in 2023, midway through a shift in Pawtucket’s District Five, Rhode Island police officer Noel Pichardo noticed a strange camera perched on a utility pole over West Avenue.
Pichardo was 28, five years into the job, and alone in his cruiser during one of the brief lulls between responding to the typical churn of radio calls for domestic disputes, petty disturbances, and welfare checks. The camera was compact and solar-powered, angled down toward passing traffic. Pichardo made a U-turn and drove beneath it again, more slowly this time, to get a better look.
He then began searching for the cameras on roads near highway ramps, at major intersections, along the routes into and out of the city. He found them again and again. By the time Pichardo finished circling the district, he knew exactly where he had seen them before.
Two years earlier, officers had gathered on the second floor of a small police substation in Pawtucket for a presentation about a surveillance system made by Flock Safety. A high-ranking police official stood in front of a PowerPoint and explained that the company’s automatic license plate readers could identify passing vehicles not only by their license plates but by bumper stickers, roof racks, and other distinguishing features. Investigators could search for a particular car across jurisdictions and, camera by camera, reconstruct where it had been.
The system was presented as another tool of routine police work, a way to recover stolen cars, locate suspects, and find missing people. But as Pichardo listened, he found himself thinking less about the vehicles police wanted than about all the others. In a medium-size city like Pawtucket, where a handful of roads carried people nearly everywhere they needed to go, a record of a car’s movements amounted to a record of a person’s life—the places they visited, the people they saw, the routines they followed.
As Pichardo understood it, the Flock proposal had gone nowhere because the city could not afford a permanent installation. So he let it slip from his mind.
But now, on that afternoon on West Avenue, the cameras were all over his district.
Pawtucket’s cameras are one small piece of a sprawling vehicle-surveillance system that touches nearly every state in the country. Flock markets its platform as the nation’s largest fixed license-plate-reader network, processing billions of sightings each month. Because departments can open their records to agencies elsewhere, a camera installed by one municipality can become searchable by investigators hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In 2021, around the time of Pichardo’s training, Flock offered Pawtucket police a free 60-day pilot. Seventeen cameras went up around the city as part of a regional test that also included Cranston and Woonsocket, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The rollout quickly drew criticism. The ACLU of Rhode Island accused the department of installing the cameras surreptitiously, after the pilot began without prior public input or notice to the city council. Pawtucket chief of police Tina Goncalves later apologized, saying that the department would “work better in the future” to communicate with the city council.
The pilot ended later that year, and in May 2023 the local TV news reported that Pawtucket was not moving forward with the installation. Pichardo believed the idea was a dead letter.
It was not. In September 2023, records show, Pawtucket moved forward with a two-year deployment worth $128,000. Records show that the city planned to install 20 cameras along many of its busiest roads, including Newport Avenue, Main Street, Broadway, Smithfield Avenue, and West Avenue—where Pichardo first noticed one hanging over the road.
“Wait a minute,” Pichardo recalled thinking. “When did we make this decision to put these up?”
Within months, Pichardo’s questions would set off a chain of events that, he says, ended his career in law enforcement. They would also eventually place him, somewhat improbably, at the center of a backlash against Flock that unites large factions of the American left and right.
For a policeman, Pichardo contains more than his share of contradictions. He speaks with a thick Rhode Island accent that sounds like something lifted from a cop movie, but he peppers his conversation with occasional references to Nietzsche or obscure films. He describes himself as private by temperament but seems driven to stand out.
Having spent some of his childhood in a poor neighborhood where drugs and gangs were part of the landscape, Pichardo says he learned that it was safest to keep his opinions to himself and stay out of other people’s business. When he was 12 or 13, he learned that his father, who had returned to the Dominican Republic several years earlier, had done so because he had a criminal record and was told it would be best if he left the country. Becoming a police officer offered a way of drawing a line between his father’s path and his own. After studying in the criminal justice program at Salve Regina University in Newport, Pichardo entered the police academy and joined the Pawtucket department in 2018. To hear him describe it, he’s always been something of an outlier on the force. “I’m possibly the only cop who would voluntarily go to musicals,” he once told me.
In the weeks following that fall shift when he first noticed Flock cameras all over town, Pichardo kept picking at the question of how the cameras had returned. Detectives, he says he learned after asking around the department, were already using the system, though many patrol officers like himself appeared to know little about it.
Pichardo contacted his work district’s local city council rep and asked how the cameras had been approved—his first time speaking to a politician, he says—but didn’t emerge with a clear answer. (Records show that the department had notified the purchasing board that it planned to move forward, but there was no public vote before the cameras were installed. The question of approval surfaced only afterward, when a council member asked whether the deployment should have come before the council. Officials said no. Installing the cameras was, they explained, an “administrative prerogative.”)
Police officers swear oaths to uphold the law and report wrongdoing. Inside the department, Pichardo said, the unwritten rule was simpler: Don’t rat. He understood that speaking publicly could end his career. But he says he was inspired by whistleblowers like Frank Serpico and Edward Snowden, men of conviction who broke with powerful institutions and spent years living with the consequences. Pichardo has a pronounced sense of right and wrong and a tendency to treat compromise as betrayal. “You should never sell your integrity,” he says.
License plate readers are a routine investigative tool, useful for locating stolen cars or identifying suspect vehicles without stopping large numbers of motorists. Experts broadly agree that reducing unnecessary police encounters and high-speed pursuits is a good thing. But to Pichardo, that usefulness was beside the larger point. Pawtucket had created a new form of surveillance over public movement with no debate, helping to build a world in which the government could quietly record where ordinary people went. It was not a world he found acceptable. If the officers who understood the system would not raise that question, he wondered, who would?
Pichardo was still wrestling with whether to speak out about Flock when he brought it up with his wife, Emily. “Do what you believe is right,” she said; they would deal with whatever followed. After that, without notifying anyone in the department, Pichardo called a reporter at Pawtucket’s local newspaper.
The article in the Valley Breeze was published on October 11, 2023. Its headline was blunt: “Pawtucket Officer Has a Big Problem With New Cameras.”
In the article, Pichardo called Flock a “grave threat” to privacy and warned that the system was ripe for abuse. He said he had learned of the full deployment from the newspaper itself, not from his own department. If a patrol officer knew so little about the cameras going up around the city, he asked, how much could the public possibly know? The whole thing gave him, he said, “1984 vibes.”
This was not whistleblowing in the conventional sense. Pichardo did not reveal a secret program, leak internal documents, or expose a specific abuse. In some respects, the newspaper knew more about the deployment than he did. What he offered instead was the rare perspective of an active-duty police officer breaking ranks to publicly argue that his own department had adopted a powerful surveillance system without enough scrutiny.
When the article appeared, the first text Pichardo received came from another officer.
“I want to congratulate you on your testicular fortitude,” it read. The officer added that he was proud of Pichardo for doing what he believed was right. Then he warned him: The brass was furious.
Pichardo says many officers supported what he had said to the Valley Breeze. Others, mostly older officers, viewed him as a traitor. One officer asked how he still had a job. Around the station, he was told that officers were calling him “Valley Breeze” behind his back. One sergeant, he says, told him he should quit.
Within weeks, the warnings began to look prescient.
Police internal investigations are not criminal cases. Their purpose is generally narrower—to determine whether an officer has violated a policy, code of conduct, or general order. Investigators interview witnesses, review body-camera or surveillance footage, collect reports and emails, and question the officer at the center of the complaint. The interview is typically recorded, and the officer is often accompanied by a union representative.
The process generates paper. A complaint. A notice of investigation. Lists of possible policy violations. Interview recordings and investigators’ notes. Findings, disciplinary recommendations, and notices of punishment.
Before the Valley Breeze article appeared, Pichardo’s disciplinary record appears to have consisted of a single incident: In 2021, while working a police detail at a production of the musical Annie, he refused a vendor’s request that he wear a face mask, and he received a written reprimand and a two-week suspension. After Pichardo spoke out against Flock, he received notice of an internal investigation into his conduct on October 25, 2023. It would be the first of many.
The department’s complaint, which originated from Chief Tina Goncalves, stated flatly that Pichardo had spoken to a newspaper without prior authorization, had undermined the authority of the police department and its chief, and had suggested that information collected by Flock cameras could be used improperly. His comments, the notice said, were “liable to cause harm to the reputation of the department and affect the impact on the community.”
The potential violations included the department’s mission statement, code of ethics, media-relations policy, and a rule labeled “Criticism & Malicious Gossip.”
Pichardo was ordered to appear at the Office of Professional Standards, a basement-level room in the Pawtucket police headquarters. Across from him, he says, were a lieutenant and a sergeant. A union representative sat beside him but said little.
The interview lasted somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes, Pichardo recalls. The questions were straightforward at first. Had he spoken to the reporter? He had. Had he done so without authorization from the department? He had. Why?
Pichardo gave much the same answer he had given the newspaper: The cameras were tracking people across the city, and the public had a right to know how they were being used. Pichardo says the lieutenant disagreed. Not every police tactic, he told Pichardo, was the public’s business. Departments did not disclose every method they used or every form of surveillance available to them.
The investigators accused Pichardo of violating the public’s trust by speaking to the press.
“I think this department violated the public trust,” he says he retorted. Then they asked who, in his view, should be held responsible. “The chief,” Pichardo said.
WIRED could not review the underlying investigative file, including the recording that might confirm or contradict Pichardo’s account. The city declined to provide the file even when Pichardo requested records concerning his own case. Pawtucket officials did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the denial.
A disciplinary agreement signed in early 2024 does, however, state that Pichardo made “critical statements to the media” about Flock and the department’s leadership. Pichardo maintained that his comments were constitutionally protected speech. The department expressly denied that position in the agreement.
After consulting an attorney, the Pawtucket police union came to the conclusion that Pichardo’s comments were constitutionally protected and sent the city a letter warning that if it disciplined him, it would likely violate his rights. According to union lodge president Michael Cioe, the department initially sought a six-month suspension but reduced the proposed punishment after the union threatened litigation.
Rather than fight the case through disciplinary hearings and possible state or federal litigation, the two sides reached an agreement. Pichardo would serve a 30-day unpaid suspension for speaking to the paper.
Pichardo said he accepted the deal because he didn’t want his coworkers to see him as their enemy. “I wanted the war to end,” he says.
By then, the department had already opened another investigation into his conduct.
A month after investigators questioned Pichardo about speaking to the Valley Breeze, another internal investigation notice arrived. In December, the department opened an inquiry over Pichardo’s failure to appear for a municipal court hearing about a traffic citation, which resulted in an additional two-day suspension. Chief Goncalves was again listed as the complainant.
Then, in March, about a week after he returned to work from the suspension, yet another notice landed—this one concerning an encounter that had allegedly taken place nearly 15 months earlier.
The incident involved a man who was being taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. The complaint alleged that Pichardo grabbed the man’s arm, refused to let him retrieve a jacket, and would not allow him to feed his cat. When the man pointed out that the cat could not open a can of food on its own, Pichardo allegedly replied that “cats can take care of themselves” and laughed.
During his interview, Pichardo says he told investigators that the cat already had food and that other officers and mental health clinicians present could confirm that he had handled the encounter appropriately. Pichardo says the inquiry didn’t sustain the allegations.
