HANOVER – Ian Struckhoff couldn’t sleep. An email from someone who used to frequent his games and comics store, The Fourth Place, explained why they won’t be coming around anymore: Flock-type cameras discovered downtown.
Struckhoff sent an email of his own to the town, the police and the college, seeking clarity on the issue, at 2:35 a.m.
“As I am sure you all know by now,” he wrote, “these devices are extremely controversial, and making a lot of news lately due to both potential and judicially confirmed abuses.”
Flock is a specific brand of automated license plate reader, or ALPR — cameras that use artificial intelligence to identify vehicles and can potentially track their movements.
According to the online tracker DeFlock, crowdsourced from reports of what individuals believe are Flock camera sightings, three ALPR cameras line Main Street, from the Dartmouth Green down to one facing Struckhoff’s business on Lebanon Street.
Anyone can report a camera sighting on DeFlock, and there’s no verification step before it goes on the map.
Hanover Town Manager Robert Houseman wrote back to Struckhoff in August to say the cameras aren’t what the map says they are.
“Hanover does not have ALPR (FLOCK) cameras, and the NH statute strictly limits Towns’ ability to use them,” Houseman wrote in response. “The traffic lights are controlled by cameras and appear to be misidentified as ALPR cameras.”
Outside of a criminal investigation, New Hampshire law states that “records of number plates read by each (license plate reader) shall not be recorded or transmitted anywhere and shall be purged from the system within three minutes of their capture in such a manner that they are destroyed and are not recoverable.”
In an email to the Valley News, Houseman provided more specifics on the town’s cameras.
“The town’s traffic lights use GRIDSMART video detection systems, which operate traffic signals and collect traffic information such as vehicle counts, turning movements, and speeds,” he stated. “GRIDSMART is not an automated license plate reader system. It detects traffic and operates signals rather than identifying vehicles.”
He added that the signals have used GRIDSMART, which is based in Knoxville, Tenn., and a product of the San Diego, Calif.-based Cubic, for over 20 years.
As for security cameras in town, he said they are “conventional video surveillance cameras used for public safety, facility security and reviewing incidents in areas covered by the cameras.”
He said these cameras also do not function as ALPRs.
Security cameras have been in place in parts of town for over a decade, he added.
Additionally, Dartmouth does not own or operate Flock or ALPR cameras, Keiselim Montás, director of the Department of Safety and Security and Emergency Operations at Dartmouth College, told the Valley News in an email.
Still, for Struckhoff, the officials’ denials haven’t settled the underlying question of his original email: “In a controversial topic that could be contravening civil rights, don’t we all deserve to know?” Struckhoff said in an interview with the Valley News.
“I am concerned,” he initially wrote to officials, “as a downtown business owner and someone who tries to foster a safe and welcoming community space, and deeply disturbed as someone personally mistreated by local police departments at a peaceful protest not long ago.”
Two years ago, Struckhoff was arrested during a pro-Palestinian demonstration that occurred on the Dartmouth Green. Struckhoff told the Valley News he wasn’t being belligerent that night. Business was open late as usual. Regulars were playing Magic: The Gathering.
The Fourth Place hosts around 50 free events a month. The protest wasn’t on the calendar, though “I generally side with a protest against genocide,” he said.
When Struckhoff heard about riot gear and armored vehicles on the Green, he closed up early, around 10:30 p.m., and walked over out of fear for the protesters’ safety. He arrived across the street from the main crowd of over 300 people after police announced that everyone must leave or face arrest.
“I didn’t leave the Green,” he recounted of his arrest, among nearly a hundred others. “Also … I was asking annoying questions of the nearest cop, like: ‘Why are you guys here?'”
In August 2026, Struckhoff asked town and college officials similar questions about Flock Safety, known for its ALPRs.
According to Flock’s website, the company operates over 120,000 cameras across the country.
Flock-style cameras also appear elsewhere in the Upper Valley on the DeFlock map, though the same pattern holds: officials confirm the cameras exist but dispute that they’re Flock or ALPR systems.
Four ALPRs are shown at the White River Junction Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
“White River Junction VA Healthcare System does not use Flock cameras or Flock integrated software systems,” Katherine Tang, public affairs officer at the White River Junction VA, said in an email. The cameras themselves are there, she confirmed, but she declined to say what type they are.
One ALPR is shown on Redwater Brook Road in Claremont.
Claremont Police Chief Brent Wilmot did not respond to multiple phone and email efforts seeking comment.
Back across the Connecticut, the DeFlock map indicates an ALPR sits on either side of the northbound lane of Interstate 91 in White River Junction.
“Under a 2013 Vermont law, the use of camera systems such as Flock and automated license plate readers is significantly restricted,” Adam Silverman, spokesperson for Vermont State Police, said in an email. “VSP does not have any devices of this sort.”
According to Capt. Matthew Nesto, chief of safety at the Vermont Highway Patrol, these cameras are Virtual Weigh Stations.
“They are not flock cameras, nor do they actually have ALPR capability,” Nesto stated in an email. “When these systems were set up, they intentionally did not add ALPRs to the systems due to this concern.”
These cameras were procured in 2025 using U.S. Department of Transportation grant funds, Nesto said, and are used “to read and then decode the DOT numbers of passing commercial vehicles as they enter the areas prior to the weigh stations.”
“In addition to getting real time/live DOT information on dangerous commercial motor carriers traveling on our roadways, the systems also weigh (while a vehicle is in motion) and can detect hazardous material loads that are placarded with hazard markings,” Nesto said.
The system, he added, can also identify “with a significant amount of precision trucks that have flat and/or underinflated tires.” The Department of Motor Vehicles and the Vermont Agency of Transportation keep and can access weight data, which, Nesto explained, helps meet federal highway size and weight standards.
In an August article, the Institute for Justice identified “well over 100 incidents of ALPR abuse, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct.”
Meanwhile, Flock Safety ALPRs may have helped authorities track down the December 2025 Brown University gunman, CBS News previously reported.
While local officials say the reports of ALPRs locally appear to be erroneous, the threat of civil rights violations remains a concern for Struckhoff.
“I am as justified in asking for this information as anybody could be. How many times do you threaten the civil rights of the same person and not expect some response?” said Struckhoff, whose late father, Gene, was an Upper Valley criminal defense attorney.
After his arrest a couple of years ago, Dartmouth barred Struckhoff from its property, which meant he couldn’t take out the trash in the college-owned alleyway. He said the criminal trespass charge was never filed in court.
In August, the prospect of losing a community member after receiving the concerned email regarding ALPRs was no false alarm to Struckhoff.
“This place is really boring when it’s just me,” Struckhoff said. “It’s just a place.”
The idea for The Fourth Place, which opened in 2022, had been germinating for 20 years, while he worked in technology — which equipped him with enough industry knowledge to deepen his concerns about ALPRs.
“There’s a concept in sociology and in retail of ‘a third place,'” he said, explaining that the first place is home and the second is work, and the third is where you find community outside of the first two.
He was lying awake one night thinking of a less generic name than ‘The Third Place,’ when it came to him like smoke drifting in and the thought of the cigar-chewing Jack Kirby, the comic-king behind Marvel’s Fantastic Four and DC’s Fourth World, made the choice clear.
“People like Stan Lee got all the credit because you have the spokesman who talks a lot, but then you have (Kirby) cranking out all the real creative work,” he said. “He was the underdog of comics. People forget that he existed.”
The Fourth Place is what he was searching for growing up in Hanover in the 1980s and ’90s, on the margins of the preppy and popular crowd with his fellow underdogs.
“I was picked on and seen as less-than because I liked Spider-Man and Dungeons & Dragons, and those are both billion-dollar things now,” he said. “I guess my people won.”
He doesn’t want to lose them.
“I put (The Fourth Place) here to be wholesome and help those slightly marginalized groups be less marginalized,” he said.
From the windows of The Fourth Place, you can look one way up Lebanon Street and see where the camera scared a customer away and look the other way to the college’s visual arts center named after Leon Black, an alumnus and former trustee who paid $170 million to Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea to soliciting prostitution.
From either end of the street, you can see stars shining in the windows of The Fourth Place.
Since the 2023 holiday season, during the shortest days of the year, downtown businesses, Dartmouth College, and the town of Hanover have partnered to put up illuminated stars in building windows.
“When it’s dark, it’s to show people that the town is bright and welcoming,” Struckhoff said. “Everybody else (eventually) takes them down.”
He can’t bring himself to take them down.
“I leave them up year-round because I can’t do the extra work of removing something that shows we’re welcoming,” he said. “But it’s also bright and makes the place sparkly and magical.”
The Valley News made multiple attempts to reach DeFlock’s media contact, but did not hear back by deadline.
