Revere Police Chief Maria LaVita addressed the department’s use of Flock license plate reader cameras at Monday night’s city council meeting.
Councilor-at-Large Marc Silvestri introduced the motion to have the chief address the council about the department’s use and policy toward the license plate reader cameras.
Earlier this year, Revere police officer Michael Tiso was suspended for three days without pay earlier this year for using the city’s Flock camera network to track a former girlfriend.
The suspension and investigation into Tiso’s use of the Flock license plate reader technology was first reported by WCVB Channel 5 news.
A complaint was filed by Tiso’s former girlfriend, Marissa Todisco, at the end of 2025. An investigation showed that Tiso used Flock cameras to search for license plates related to Todisco or her family more than a dozen times in the summer of 2025.
Before the council, LaVita spoke about the importance of the cameras when it comes to preventing and solving crimes, as well as the policies that are in place to help prevent further misuse.
During the public comment period of Monday night’s council meeting, several residents, including Todisco, spoke out against the use of the Flock cameras in Revere.
LaVita referred to the camera systems as Automated License Plate Reader technology (ALPR), and said they serve as an important and effective public safety tool.
“When used appropriately, the systems can help officers locate missing or endangered individuals, recover stolen vehicles, and aid in identifying suspects in violent crimes,” LaVita.
The chief said the technology has also been used for misdemeanors and quality of life issues such as hit and run accidents and illegal dumping. The system helps identify critical leads in serious investigations and also and help clear suspects mistakenly identified in crimes, she added.
“Tools, such as ALPR, make the Revere Police Department more efficient,” said LaVita. “We’ve solved crimes that very likely would have been unsolved if not for this information, and we have done so in a very timely manner.”
In 2026, LaVita said the police department has documented 27 cases where ALPR was instrumental in providing information that led to cases being solved.
ALPR systems can work in several ways, including flagging the license plates of stolen motor vehicles.
“It does not operate facial recognition, it does not give citations,” said LaVita. “In addition to flagging stolen motor vehicles, officers can proactively search the database, but the data is not accessible to our officers unless a specific query is done. When doing that, officers must enter the reason for the query and now must enter a Revere police case number which documents who made the query, when it was made, and why.”
The department’s data is kept for 30 days.
“We share data with some law enforcement agencies, that is one of the things that makes it effective,” said LaVita. “ICE does not have access to our data, and no searches can be made that involve any immigration enforcement. ALPR technology increases the chances we get it right and decreases the chance we get it wrong; it makes us more efficient, clearance rates are high because of this and other technology available to our officers.”
Silvestri praised the job LaVita and the department has done since LaVita became chief.
“The technology you brought, drones, equipment that provides in-time translation to our officers have been next to amazing,” he said. “I am a big proponent of using these types of technology to make policing more effective. But as a veteran and someone who served, I find the freedoms they sometimes are questioned into taking is an issue.”
Silvestri said there are communities removing the ALPRs or going with companies other than Flock, and asked what Revere is doing to prevent future instances of misuse of the technology.
“One big thing is policy; we have issued a policy and now we are reviewing that policy and tightening that policy,” said LaVita. “We are looking at best practices, we are looking at model policies that just came out over the weekend. We are conducting audits; I have implemented an audit assistance tool, and what that does is it makes oversight more efficient, it identifies any unusual patterns that are flagged and then reviewed by supervisors.”
In addition to that, LaVita said the department is setting expectations for officers and increasing training.
“The public has repeatedly been told that policies and procedures exist, yet we are just starting to learn about them now,” Todisco had noted earlier in the meeting during the public comment period. “We have been told that … all officers in the Revere Police Department are able to use Flock technology. The community has serious questions in regard to this matter.”
Todisco said some of those questions revolve around who has access to the technology and whether officers can also access it while they are off-duty, as well as about the legitimacy of the searches.
“As a resident of Revere, I’m hoping these questions can be answered tonight with full transparency, as what has been going on in the past couple of weeks to months in this city has been absolutely despicable and I’m hoping that we can get some full transparency from the police department,” said Todisco.