A vote to cancel the city of Newburgh's contract with Flock Safety for automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras failed this week. This was after city councilors argued over whether the resolution went far enough.
Dozens of cities and agencies across the U.S. have ended their relationships with Flock amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized surveillance.
A flurry of examples have surfaced of law enforcement officers misusing the technology for personal searches. Meanwhile, police have credited the technology as an important crime-fighting innovation that has helped locate missing people and track suspects in violent crimes.
Newburgh renewed its contract with Flock, one of the nation’s largest providers of ALPRs, in January.
In recent months, Councilman Omari Shakur has continually proposed a resolution directing interim City Manager Jason Morris to work with the corporation counsel's office to end the contract as soon as possible. The resolution also calls on the city to stop using all Flock devices within 14 days of passage.
On Monday, Shakur and council members Giselle Martinez and Robert McLymore voted in favor of Shakur's latest attempt. But, a majority either voted against or abstained.
“We’ve been talking about this for three months, that's discussing what we worked on. Why haven’t we worked on it these three months? Why? We’re going through another delay tactic," Shakur said before Monday's vote. "And say, we want it but I'm not gonna vote on it. I love you but I'm not gonna marry you.”
During public comment, city resident Corbin Laedlein said comments at past meetings — many made by Mayor Torrance Harvey — saying surveillance is commonplace or necessary ignore the current dangers it poses to immigrants and women.
“There are the instances of the false positives and you know people getting flagged by this technology and then being held at gunpoint or with dogs drawn on them for having done nothing.” Laedlein said.
According to Amreeta Mathai, director of strategy and program for the New York Civil Liberties Union, canceling Flock contracts is worthwhile because old data quickly becomes irrelevant.
“If you were to stop sharing your data like from now moving forward, right, like the usefulness of the old data that's already been collected is it gets stale really fast. It's not like the old data continues to be useful moving forward,” Mathai said.
The council members who didn't support the resolution said they don't support Flock. Instead, they said they voted as they did because Shakur's resolution is not strong enough.
Councilman Ronald Zorrilla said the current resolution is flawed. He suggested the city could soon take action but he accused Shakur of rushing the process. He asked Shakur to collaborate more on the resolution.
“You could talk to me too," Zorrilla said. "There is no termination clause in this contract. There is a way to get out of it without sending [Flock] hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's not giving them an appropriation in September in a month. So the rush to do it right now feels really good. But it would send hundreds of our thousands of our dollars to a company that we do not agree with.”
Councilwoman Tamika Stewart said the resolution needs to include checks on how any public data the city collects is used.
“I don't care what system we use, and I've said this before, every system has to have a failsafe,” Stewart said. "It has to have guardrails. Regardless of who is using it, we need to know who's accessing, not just Flock, but any systems that we have."
Harvey said the funding for Flock came from a state Division of Criminal Justice Services grant. He is concerned canceling the contract could run the risk of ruining the city’s relationship with DCJS and jeopardize funding for youth programs like MARCS Friends and Dandelions Are Flowers Too.
Shakur reminded his colleagues that they had been talking about the resolution for months. With that in mind, he suggested they figure out final text of the resolution during Monday's meeting, which drew applause for the audience.
Continuing the tense exchange, Zorrilla accused Shakur of not wanting to collaborate with him. He said he doesn't think they should hash out their differences on legislation in public. But, he thinks Shakur wants to "put on a show for everyone" during the council meeting.
As Shakur sought to continue arguing with Zorrilla, Harvey called for a vote on the resolution.
Flock announced Thursday it is making changes to its platform intended to quell privacy concerns and address documented abuses of its system by some members of law enforcement.
ALPRs document plate data and other vehicle characteristics as automobiles pass Flock’s cameras. The thousands of law enforcement agencies that contract with the company can search and share that data across jurisdictions to inform investigations.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley told the Associated Press Thursday that many of the product changes will make what were once optional guardrails mandatory for its users to implement by Jan. 1. Langley said that change will give individual cities and departments control to use the system in a manner “consistent with community values.”
In February, Arkansas police held a family at gunpoint and arrested them, after a Flock camera misread their license plate, flagging it as a stolen vehicle.
The Institute of Justice reported dozens of cases where ALPRs, like Flock, have led to erroneous detainments and arrests over the past few years. There have also been cases when officers have been accused of using the technology for personal use to track partners and ex-partners.
Among the changes Flock announced Thursday, all law enforcement customers will have to implement an audit tool that’s intended to flag abnormal search behavior. When the system detects abnormal behavior, the user would be locked out, pending an internal review.
Law enforcement users will now also be required to enter a code from their records management system tying each search to a specific case before it is run, something Langley said civil liberties advocates have long been calling for. Overrides for emergencies would be automatically flagged for review, the company said.
Flock customers will also be allowed to decide which offense types — such as homicide or arson — outside agencies can search their data for, which would allow a customer to block outside searches related to immigration enforcement, the company said.
Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist for the NYCLU, said Flock is very different from surveillance technologies of the past. He said Flock is far more powerful.
“What we're seeing here is a completely new form of invasive surveillance that is very different than a police officer standing at an intersection and looking for a specific suspect or monitoring traffic manually,” Schwarz said. “The automated tracking by a hundred thousand cameras across the country that feed into a centralized database where artificial intelligence creates heat maps about individual drivers where you can quickly search for a particular sticker on a car based on a political statement or an association with a certain political organization, etc.”
Flock, which says its customers own the data that the cameras record, is also shortening the standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. It said it will allow data to be preserved for longer when it is evidence tied to a case number.
