Flock Follow-Up: The Missing Records

On July 13, MNN asked the City of Malden for every digitally searchable record since January 1 that mentioned "Flock Safety." On July 22, City Records Administrator Joanne Perperian said an initial search of email alone had already turned up nearly 3,000 messages: "We estimate it will take 2 minutes to review each one to ensure it is responsive to your request and perform necessary redactions." So, to streamline the process, on July 23, MNN narrowed its request — considerably.

The narrowed request asked for records dated January 1 through July 23, excluding the Malden Police Department's and Flock Safety's own domains, and narrowed further to only those containing all three of the words "Flock Safety," "privacy," and "data" — not any one of them, not any two, all three. MNN also asked the City to confirm exactly which search it ran, by providing the actual query used to respond.

On August 17, the City produced 78 documents. It did not provide the query.

What 78 documents actually contain

We read all 78. Seventy-one are individual emails; seven are other records, including public-records-request confirmations. We checked closely against the three-word test MNN specified. The production is a mix: 34 records contain all three terms, 19 contain two, and 18 contain only one.

That mixture isn't, by itself, evidence of anything. Some of the two-term matches are almost beside the point. Two records addressed to the City's Chief Financial Officer are Law360 legal-newsletter digests — one about a Louisiana slavery-reparations trial, one about police drone programs — that happen to use the words "Flock" and "privacy" in passing, in stories that have nothing to do with Malden's cameras at all.

Other two-term matches are squarely on point. On May 14, Councillor Carey McDonald — a sitting City Councillor now on the ballot in the September 1 State Senate primary — sought "the list of other communities who Malden is connected to via our Flock cameras." The reply, sent the next morning, attached a file: "Malden PD Flock Safety Agency List.pdf." That attachment is not provided — despite attachments being routinely produced elsewhere.

The same bulletin, five recipients, three of them missing one each

Buried in the pattern of what MPD sent and to whom, one document trail stands out. On January 13, then-Police Chief Glenn Cronin emailed the full City Council a "Flock Cameras Information Sheet." The same day, he sent it to Mayor Christenson's special assistant. The next day, Captain Marc Gatcomb sent a similar packet directly to Councillor McDonald. On May 4, Chief Cronin forwarded the same file to Mayor Christenson himself — nearly four months after the Council had already received it. All four of those copies are in the City's production.

A fifth and sixth copy are not. On April 9, Detective Steven Mulcahy sent a more detailed technical version — covering system access, audit trails, and data-sharing safeguards — to Captain Gatcomb, who forwarded it the same day to Councillors Ryan O'Malley and Steve Winslow. On April 28, Gatcomb sent the same technical bulletin to Councillor Karen Colón-Hayes. We searched the full 78-document production for any trace of that April 9 original — by sender, by recipient, and by the bulletin's own distinctive language. It isn't there. The only record dated April 9 in the entire production is an unrelated public-records response addressed to a different requester.

One likely explanation deserves to be raised and addressed directly: MNN's own July 23 narrowing excluded any email sent from a maldenpd.org or maldenpd.com address, and Gatcomb's forwards originate from his MPD account. If that's why O'Malley's and Colón-Hayes' copies are missing, the same rule should have excluded McDonald's — his January 14 copy is also, per its own header, "From: Marc Gatcomb ." It's in the production. Whatever explains the gap, a blanket MPD-sender exclusion isn't a sufficient account of it on its own.

Both missing copies were provided to MNN independently — not by the City, but by the councillors who received them.

Councillor Colón-Hayes, who has announced her candidacy for Mayor, provided MNN with her April 28 email directly. It contains all three required terms, was sent from a City Council address rather than an MPD address, and falls within the date range MNN specified.

Councillor O'Malley, a candidate for State Senate challenging Councillor McDonald in the September 1 primary, told MNN by phone that he forwards City correspondence to his personal email as a standing backup practice. Asked about the emails missing from the City's 78, he located his own April 9 copy within minutes of the call and forwarded it. It also contains all three required terms.

A separate, and separately serious, records dispute

A third independently-obtained record doesn't fit the three-word test at all, because it isn't about whether MNN's search should have caught an email — it's about whether a record was preserved long enough to be produced to anyone.

Bruce Friedman, the public-records activist behind OpenCommonwealth.org, separately requested Flock camera footage from a specific date: June 23, 2026. Under Flock's standard 30-day retention policy, footage from that date would have aged out of the system by roughly July 23 — the same day MNN was narrowing its own request. The City's response to Friedman did not arrive until August 13, more than three weeks past that window, and stated the footage did not exist. Friedman has since petitioned the Supervisor of Public Records over the gap between when he asked and when the City responded.

The timing of a separate, unrelated development is worth flagging. On August 13 — the same day the City responded to Friedman — Flock Safety published a blog post titled Flock Updates Privacy, Accountability, Security, and Transparency Safeguards, announcing a new recommended default retention period of seven days, down from 30. The company was explicit that the change isn't automatic: "Existing customers will keep their current, democratically approved retention periods" unless they opt in. There's no indication Malden has adopted the shorter window. But the direction of travel is relevant context: Massachusetts public records law gives custodians up to 10 business days just to respond to a request, let alone produce records. A retention period shorter than that response window would make Friedman's underlying problem structural, not incidental — for any community that adopts it.

MNN is not in a position to referee Friedman's dispute with the City, and his petition is his own, not ours. But the underlying question is directly relevant to this story: if responsive records can age out of Flock's system while a request for them is pending, that's a real constraint on what "the City's production" can ever be assumed to represent — regardless of what search terms anyone used.

A vendor's own line to the Mayor's office

One more record surfaced through Bruce Friedman's separate, broader public-records request — #2026-0137, filed March 26 — which sought the last 503 emails to or from Mayor Christenson as of that date. The City's response confirms that on March 25, 2026, Flock Safety's own "LE Team" — the company's law-enforcement liaison group — emailed the Mayor directly. The subject line: "Lack of Information Isn't the Problem."

To be precise about what this is and isn't: this record does not belong in the "missing" category above. MNN's own July 23 narrowing specifically excluded emails sent from a flocksafety.com address, and this one is from flocksafety.com. It was never going to appear in the City's response to MNN regardless of what search the City ran. We're including it here because it's independently newsworthy on its own terms — it shows the vendor itself, not just MPD, has direct email access to the Mayor's office — not because its absence from the 78 tells us anything.

What we're not saying

We are not saying the City intentionally left out records that reflect on a mayoral or State Senate race it has a stake in. We don't have evidence of intent, and a production that's a genuine mixture — some records that clear the bar, some that don't, some that miss it by an attachment — is not what a deliberately curated production would look like.

What we can say, plainly: two councillors' own copies of a document the City otherwise distributed to other people are not in a production that was supposed to include them. One of those councillors is running against the Mayor. The other is running against a colleague reported to have the Mayor's support, in a primary days after this article published. The City was asked to disclose the search it actually ran. It has not done so.

The question isn't whether someone intended to shape the story. The question is whether the records the City was asked to find were actually found — and whether the records that were found are the records the City was asked to produce.

Continuing coverage

• This is part of our continuing coverage of the municipal use of Flock Safety — read Salem Drops Flock, Flock in Flight, Flock, By the Numbers, and Flock Public Pushback.