According to reporting by Who Are These People, “Washington Township in Gloucester County spent nearly $60,000 on Flock Safety license plate reader cameras between 2025 and 2026, charged to its opioid settlement budget.”
This is how Washington Township (Gloucester County) described opioid settlement fund disbursements in their FY 2025 Opioid Settlement Funding Report:
Washington Township reported that it did not engage the public before deciding how to use its opioid abatement funds. The township described its strategy as including public safety enhancements and efforts to address addiction-related crime.
Who Are These People did a deep dive into how municipalities around New Jersey were spending national opioid settlement funds and found everything from Flock cameras to trading cards to car wraps. In New Jersey, this information is challenging to find unless you know what you’re looking for. The report above was linked under the “Important Documents” tab of the New Jersey Opioid Settlement page.
National opioid settlement funds are administered at the state level, but the level of transparency about how those funds are being used varies from state to state. Some states offer portals you can search. Other states offer an assortment of PDFs that you need to click around to find.
This reporting is local to New Jersey, but the underlying question isn’t. Communities nationwide are deciding how to spend opioid settlement funds. An unusual expenditure in one municipality gives residents and reporters elsewhere something concrete to investigate in their own communities. That information should be easy to find.
Header image credit: Epicdeflocker64, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons