Saratoga Springs residents are joining the growing list of northeast communities raising the alarm around the use of Flock cameras in their city – some spoke out at Tuesday’s city council meeting.
Hi Ray.
Before we get into the meeting, give us a rundown on the use of Flock in Saratoga Springs.
The city entered a contract with Flock Safety at the end of 2023. Currently, that includes 12 automated license plate reader cameras. For the most part, the cameras are placed near the gateways to the city. So for example, near Saratoga Race Course as you head east or along South Broadway toward Albany.
Like other law enforcement agencies, the Saratoga Springs Police Department says the cameras are a useful tool; most recently, city police arrested someone who was a suspect in a Connecticut murder after their car was picked up by one of the city’s cameras.
Ok, so what did residents have to say at last night’s meeting?
As we’ve been seeing in municipalities across the Northeast, there are plenty of city residents who see the cameras as an invasion of privacy and who worry about where the data is going.
Just last week, we saw a startling case out of Albany where a county investigator was charged after allegedly misusing their Flock data to track her former girlfriend and former acquaintances thousands of times.
One Saratoga Springs resident, Rob Kaughlin, shared a few concerns last night.
“There's a legal question whether it violates the fourth amendment illegal search terms. There's data showing that third parties unknown to Saratoga Springs have access to the data and we don't know what those third parties do with it. There's the loss of control of the data by resale by these companies like Flock as was mentioned and the risk of their misuse and no ability to audit where that data goes. Multiple examples of inaccurate imaging are all over the news, leading to innocent citizens being detained."
And how did city officials respond?
Well, Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll opened his response by citing established case law that backs up the constitutionality of using license plate readers.
Coll said he fully backs the use of the cameras in the city and explained how they’ve become a regular part of city law enforcement efforts.
I spoke with Coll this morning about some of the measures the city has in place to ensure the collected data is not misused.
“So we have eight policies that govern the use of the investigative technique. Each person that uses it has a unique user ID number and password. We also have limited the searches to supervisors ad investigators and we also conduct audits at least monthly, more frequently sometimes twice a month,” said Coll.
WAMC has requested access to those audits of the city’s license plate reader data.
The calls from residents to not renew the city’s Flock contract fell a bit flat though, right? What can you say about that?
The city did entered into an initial three-year contract with Flock in December 2023, and in order for a municipality to cancel their contract, as opposed to an automatic renewal, they need to give Flock a 30-day heads up.
That would mean the start of November is when the city would have to inform Flock of their plans to cancel the contract.
The only thing is that the city was delayed in actually getting the cameras up and running, so the contract was extended and is set to expire in August 2027.
