The McLean County Sheriff's department is fessing up to an error that allowed federal immigration agencies to search its database of Flock Safety license plate reading cameras for more than four months this year.
Sheriff Matt Lane has come forward to report various agencies accessed sheriff's department data between April and Aug. 12 this year, potentially for immigration reasons.
Lane said his department had the license plate reading cameras installed in April and set them up to be searchable by other law enforcement agencies.
For instance, a police department in Indiana might be looking for a vehicle with a license plate connected to a series of burglaries. Lane said most out-of-state searches came from police agencies in neighboring states.
He said his department used such data to find a murder suspect who had gone to Texas, and a police department in that state found the suspect after McLean County told them the agency’s cameras showed the person of interest might be in a certain area. The general notion is the more agencies you cooperate with, the more will cooperate with you. It strengthens the investigative tool.
In August, McLean County had six cameras on the outskirts of Bloomington-Normal placed to fill holes in coverage from the greater number of cameras placed by the Bloomington and Normal police departments. The sheriff’s department will eventually have eight cameras.
Flock Safety let the sheriff's department know an audit showed other agencies were using its camera images for immigration purposes. That is against Illinois law.
"Within a few hours, we had everyone shut off outside the state of Illinois," said Lane.
He said the original department policy was to have a relatively open door on the data, but agencies had to attest that they were following Illinois law in not using the data for immigration purposes.
So, the agencies were signing off on that requirement electronically, and then going ahead and using it on immigration?
“Yes,” said Lane. "When we did this policy, it was before January. We didn't have an immigration push. It wasn't on the forefront. And now it is."
Lane said McLean County's cameras had up to 700 hits for license plates sought by immigration agencies over the four-month period. To put that number in perspective, Lane said the entire Flock nationwide searches were several hundred thousand a month.
Lane said he doesn't have information whether those were verified contacts.
"Let's say you have a partial license plate, and you put it in. That will come back as a hit. But you would then have to verify is that the car, is that the full license plate. Is that the car I'm looking for? So, we don't have that information," he said.
Another way a false hit happens is if a license plate number is the same as the one being sought, but it's from a different state.
Flock Safety has said its 80,000 cameras nationwide also record distinguishing features of vehicles such as bumper stickers, dents, and broken windows.
What Lane suspects was happening was that Border Patrol and other immigration agencies were doing nationwide system searches.
"I don't think they were targeting people in Central Illinois. I think they were casting a net, and we were part of the net because we were cooperating with several agencies," said Lane, noting some of the searches that could have been for immigration might not have been for that purpose.
"Our policy is you have to put in the reason that you are asking into Flock. You have to have a legal, a law enforcement reason for asking. And some of them had immigration in there. Some of them had 8-U.S. Code 13-24. Some of them had just USBP for Border Patrol," said Lane.
That U.S. Code 13-24, for instance, covers immigration enforcement, but also takes in human trafficking and other crimes, said Lane.
With tighter access, searches are now in the hundreds instead of hundreds of thousands and only from agencies within Illinois.
"We needed to tighten up. And we did. We corrected the problem. And we're going to monitor this closely to make sure there are no other adjustments we need to make," said Lane, who offered this assurance to the immigrant community.
"I think there was very little useful information out of the hits that they got," he said, adding an internal audit shows no sheriff's department investigators have run plate numbers through Flock for immigration purposes.
Lane said the formal policy for his department is in the revision process, and he's already changed the practice. He said he's pretty sure there are other Illinois police agencies that have the same problem. He's not aware of anyone specific.
The Bloomington and Normal police departments already had more restrictive policies on use of Flock data that prevents the same issue, said Lane.
