As the federal government began mass deportations, Kent City Council in April delayed purchasing 14 automated license plate readers over concerns about data sharing with federal agencies.
Now those fears appear to be playing out across the country as Flock Safety, the company producing the surveillance technology, has allegedly shared its data with ICE and developed a people lookup tool, according to reporting from 404 Media.
Typically mounted on roadside poles, the cameras capture rear license plates as the vehicles move away. Depending which way the cameras are pointed, police can pinpoint when a vehicle is entering or leaving a community or an area in a community.
Police enter license plate data into Ohio’s Law Enforcement Automated Data System (LEADS), a separate network which can yield personal information. Police departments can also enter into data-sharing agreements with other state and federal agencies, providing and receiving information their cameras have captured.
The company operates a national network that already includes Stow, Ravenna, Brimfield, Tallmadge and Aurora.
Requesting the purchase, Kent Police Chief Nicholas Shearer told council members in April that the cameras would be sited at the city’s exits and at strategic downtown locations. Kent council members expressed concerns about checks and balances, accountability, and the city’s ability to hold out should federal agencies request the camera data. City council opted to continue debating the purchase, and expects to reconsider the matter in October.
Flock Safety is also upgrading the cameras to provide video feeds.
“If five vehicles match a description near a crime scene, the added video helps narrow that list to the one vehicle fleeing the scene,” Flock’s website states.
Police can search for, say, a man wearing a blue hoodie and a backpack, or set alerts to be notified when a camera finds a green ATV on a trailer or a person wearing an orange vest. The website specifies that people’s characteristics can only be searched on video feeds, not LPR feeds.
That level of surveillance has at least two council members concerned.
Council Member Chris Hook said Kent’s council members seem to have lost their appetite for purchasing ALPR’s. (Hook voted against purchasing the cameras in April.)
“I don’t think Flock is going to be part of the future of the city of Kent, at least in the near future,” he said. “If we’re concerned about personal safety just from the license plate readers, I know we’d be concerned about personal safety from reading people’s hat colors.”
Saying community feedback supports his stance, Council Member Jeff Clapper — who initially supported purchasing the cameras — also expressed concern about installing the license plate readers, with or without video feeds. He told The Portager he trusts Kent police, but not other jurisdictions.
“I know who they told us would be monitoring the data, but given the current state of federal affairs, who’s to say they’re not going to come in and say, ‘We want that data.’ I just don’t know if there’s a point in the future where somebody comes in and says, ‘Like it or not, we’re taking this information,’” he said.
Shearer could not be reached for comment.
Also concerned about surveillance — with or without video feeds — is local employment and civil rights attorney Nancy Grim.
“Is this what we want to be?” she asked. “Do we want to put our citizens in our city subject to this kind of peeping? We don’t know how far it goes.”
A surveillance system that captures license plates and short videos can open the door to all kinds of accessible information, and there’s no way to know if Kent or any community can put guardrails in place that will hold up, Grim said.
Protections may exist regarding who can authorize access to the information, but “right now we’re in a place where federal leadership is issuing edicts to small and large organizations across the country, if you don’t do this for the government, if you don’t share this information, then you’ll lose federal funding,” Grim said.
What’s needed, said Ohio ACLU legislative director Gary Daniels, are state laws that dictate exactly how surveillance technology can be used. As things now stand, police departments may adopt internal policy regarding such tools, but there is no force of law behind them, he said.
“There’s really nothing to prevent them tracking an individual as they travel through a city or a county. You can see, for instance, who’s going to a particular protest, who’s going to the gun store, who’s going to the mosque, who’s going to the gay bar, who’s going to get mental health treatment, all these wide variety of things. There’s nothing out there whatsoever stopping law enforcement from tracking people doing those sorts of things,” he said.
Daniels likened Ohio’s technology environment to “the Wild West,” saying individual companies are stepping in where governments have failed to tread, perhaps for reasons rooted in time, effort, knowledge, logistics, and/or money. Flock Safety can say what it wants, but as a private company it can just easily change its policies and procedures, he said.
“I don’t think that the ACLU of Ohio is ever going to be comfortable with the use of automatic license plate readers because of the potential they have, in our minds, to invade people’s privacy, despite what the courts say with regard to your expectation of privacy,” he said.
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.