A longtime presence at the Bloomington Police Department said while Flock-branded license plate readers are a relatively new addition, the technology has been in use for decades — and for the last 14 years at BPD.
Crime data analyst Jack McQueen gave a presentation Wednesday to the city's Public Safety and Community Relations Board [PSCRB], Bloomington's civilian-led body for police transparency and communication.
It's McQueen's second time before the board but being now five years into BPD's Flock Safety camera program, some residents have grown concerned about the third-party vendor and what the department does with all that data.
But his email
McQueen did not shy away from the elephant in the room.
“I got a call from multiple people saying, hey, your emails are out online,” he said, in a section of his presentation about public perception.
A group called Shut the Flock Off requested all emails within the Bloomington Police Department with the word “Flock” in them.
It was 79,000 emails.
A narrowing resulted in the group still receiving thousands of documents, one of which was posted on social media last week. McQueen added that email to one of his slides.
“Highlighted in there is my statement that they posted online,” he said. “It says ‘these issues are putting our system and data at risk,’ which was alarming to a lot of people. We got a lot of phone calls, and they said ‘Uh oh, that’s that data from the LPRs.”
LPR stands for License Plate Reader, static cameras positioned along roadways and in police vehicles to capture images of plates and the make, model and color of cars. Hundreds of police agencies in Illinois lease cameras produced by Flock Safety.
Bloomington has 30 Flock cameras. Normal also has about 30. The McLean County Sheriff's Department has 12. Chenoa and LeRoy have a few, too.
The Atlanta, Ga.-based company owns the gear; police departments buy and manage their data.
The email posted online is from McQueen to Flock Safety expresses concern over access given to officers who shouldn't have had it. In the email, McQueen said, "The problem now goes deeper on your side, and we are losing confidence in the company being able to secure our system properly."
“This is my email,” McQueen said. “I’m telling you right now, this is a valid email. That’s my email. The problem with it was, I’m not talking about LPR data in this email.”
McQueen then shared the full email chain with an explanation. In the department's Real-time Crime Data Center, he said, there is integration of 13 different technologies. That includes Flock cameras, public safety video cameras installed downtown and in parks, in-car dash cameras and officer body worn cameras.
“For 12 hours down at Bloomington, in that system, an officer could have went in and clicked on a camera and renamed it,” he said. “We do not give our patrol officers access to the cameras in the city that contain live video. That’s what that email is.”
Handling the data
Brad Bell leads the group Shut the Flock Off and has been driving much of the conversation about Flock LPRs online.
“I just wanted to say, not everything that solves crime is good,” he said during a discussion period at Wednesday’s meeting.
Bell was among about 15 people who attended. The group has organized in-person and online meetings and produces a booklet with information about Flock.
“We’re told that sharing [data] in a cloud is a benefit instead of it being hosted locally. To me, this is even scarier because we don’t know what happens to it when it’s in that cloud, necessarily. We know what we’re told, clearly, but we do know that there’s been a lot of access issues and misuse issues.”
Others raised similar concerns, that data had been used by federal immigration authorities, for example. The McLean County Sheriff previously said when some of their new cameras were installed, the default settings allowed federal authorities to access its data for a four-month period before they locked down permissions.
Shawn Cooper from Bloomington was among them. She asked McQueen how much access federal agencies have to the department’s Flock camera data.
“Zero,” said McQueen.
Cooper cited examples of data being used to track protestors in another state, to which McQueen reiterated that data is locally managed by municipalities, with policies set by individual police departments.
“We own the data. We control the data. We control the distribution of the data,” he said.
McQueen said Bloomington's policy is to store data for 30 days in a cloud-based secure server. Video collected by public safety cameras is held for just 14 days, also in cloud storage—and those are not Flock brand. McQueen said cloud storage facilitates data sharing between agencies. And frankly, he said, everything's cloud based: police case files, body cam footage, court records—the whole nine yards. McQueen said the department audits its use of the data, twice, actually, and publishes every look-up in the BPD's transparency portal.
“When that data gets captured, it’s encrypted. It’s encrypted at the highest levels, on the camera, to the cloud, in transit,” he said. “…stored encrypted, encrypted on the way back down, and the only way you can get the information out of this system is a published PDF that is a piece of evidence that goes into an electronic system that is our evidence system, separate from that vendor, that then goes to court.”
McQueen gave ample examples of how LPR and other technology has been used in investigations to close cases, in many cases more quickly than without that tool. But despite a long list of success stories, other recent examples show not only citizens but some departments are thinking twice about Flock.
In the northwest Illinois city of Crystal Lake, the police chief has been arrested, facing charges for allegedly using Flock data hundreds of times to track people he knew. And the other Bloomington—Bloomington, Indiana—pulled its Flock program amid public pressure from community members.
Internal and statewide audits have shown no misuse in the Bloomington Police Department, according to McQueen, who said its 30-day window is uniquely stringent, changing the “cadence” of police work in the department, he said. Detectives similarly only have 14 days to access video data from public safety cameras.
“We would rather work at a very fast cadence, hard, to get a crime solved, than keep more data on the public,” he said. “Which is so ‘not government’ to most people.”
McQueen said officers do a “walk and talk” with community members whose homes are near a new camera when it’s installed. And he's invited the Shut the Flock Off group to speak with him three times. Bell said he wanted to go through the materials they received through FOIA to determine what questions to ask. He said they may take McQueen up on the invitation in the future.
