By John Dobberstein, Editor
After 90 minutes of spirited debate, the Broken Arrow City Council voted to approve a service contract Tuesday with Flock Safety to provide five license plate reader (LPR) cameras for the police department.
After a 60-day pilot period, the Broken Arrow Police Department will operate under an $18,000 lease agreement with Flock to use the cameras and software in the city. The technology is already in use by many other police departments in the metro area, including the Tulsa Police Department.
The agreement was approved on a 4-1 vote, with Ward 3 Councilwoman Christi Gillespie voting against it.
Police Chief Brandon Berryhill said the cameras will be a crucial tool in helping officers locate stolen vehicles – a crime that has been on the rise in Broken Arorw, he said – as well as retail theft, cars wanted in criminal acts in other jurisdictions, or to find an endangered person named in a Silver or Amber alert.
Probable cause not needed
He notes that only vehicles that have been entered on the NCIC law enforcement database would trigger an alert with police, and that no facial recognition capabilities are being used with the system. The data that is captured is stored on a secure cloud server – which must meet Criminal Justice Information Services security regulations — and is only kept 30 days before being purged, according to Berryhill.
One question he’s been asked is whether police must have probable cause to run a tag or take a picture of a vehicle, and the answer is “no” he said.
“I could put an officer at every single intersection with a camera, a pen, a piece of paper and a computer and they could take a picture and run every tag all day long. That’s perfectly legal,” Berryhill said. “We’re just using a system to do it automatically so we can save that manpower and put that staffing out in the field to answer calls for service.”
The procedure with Flock is the same as an officer running a plate the traditional way through the police radio, as there is confirmation with dispatchers that the vehicle is still wanted for a crime or other law enforcement reason. The procedure with Flock is similar, he said, as officers must still confirm through dispatch that the vehicle is wanted before law enforcement action is taken.
“The only tags that pop up in these license plate reader systems are ones that have been entered because they’re subject of a crime. They’re wanted for some reason, or someone’s looking for that person like an Amber alert,” Berryhill said. “That’s the only time you’ll get a hit on a tag as it goes through.
“If your car’s not been reported in a crime, has not been reported as stolen, and you’re not a subject under a criminal investigation for some reason and there’s reason enough to want to stop you, your tag is not going to pop up and alert law enforcement that it needs to be looked at.”
He reiterated the cameras are not being used for traffic or speed enforcement or for insurance tracking.
For a police officer to put a vehicle tag in the system there is an audit trail and there has to be justification for taking that action, he notes.
Broken Arrow police had a successful experience with the system in August, when a license plate reader in Tulsa assisted them in arresting two men connected to an alleged kidnapping on Aug. 16. Responding officers and dispatchers worked with the city of Tulsa’s Real Time Information Center in Tulsa to locate the suspects’ vehicle as it was traveling on the Broken Arrow Expressway.
“The Broken Arrow Police Department has plans to utilize similar technology in the near future. This will allow officers in Broken Arrow and Tulsa to work together, across both jurisdictions, and solve crimes faster,” Broken Arrow police said in a Facebook post.
Broken Arrow City Manager Michael Spurgeon asked Berryhill what success looked like after the 60-day trial period. In testing another system out recently using a parked trailer, anywhere from 10 to 15 stolen cars per week were identified on Highway 51 alone. The cameras will be mobile and likely be targeted toward crime hotspots and retail centers.
“So we anticipate we may see our crime rate rise because we’re going to see stolen cars that are in our city or being stolen from our city that we weren’t seeing before. So success for us is going to be seeing things that we can’t normally see,” Berryhill said.
Privacy concerns abound
However, there was some opposition Tuesday to implementing the system, chiefly from Gillespie.
She questioned where the data being transferred by the system would be stored in the cloud, and who would have access to it, such as the Department of Homeland Security or FBI or another agency utilizing the Patriot Act to review stored data.
I just think it’s a very slippery slope of violating our privacy,” Gillespie said. “It has nothing to do with me thinking our police department has anything nefarious. And I understand we want to get all the bad guys, but is it actually making us safer? I don’t know that it’s keeping crimes from actually happening.”
Berryhill responded that the tags and other information about stolen vehicles are already being reported to the National Crime Information Center database, which can only be accessed to law enforcement. “And so that database is accessible by any law enforcement agency. And it’s always been like that,” he said.
There are several databases the department uses that it doesn’t own, such as the city’s computer-aided dispatch system which stores data in the cloud. Systems such as Flock that are marketed to law enforcement must be CJIS compliant and that data is not sold or open to the public.
“When you and the mayor went through our Citizens Police Academy, we ran you through our national database to make sure you weren’t wanted somewhere else. So I think that information’s out there a lot more than you would think that it is,” Ward 2 City Councilwoman Lisa Ford told Gillespie. “The way I look at this is you’re going after the bad guys.”
Berryhill used the example of the Tulsa Police Department communicating that it has a tag number for a vehicle involved in three shootings. Tulsa’s officers could provide that to Broken Arrow and the Flock system would potentially catch the car if it traveled into the city.
“That will make the city safer,” Berryhill said. “There is no wall between us and Tulsa. And it’s no secret that some of the crime that we’re experiencing is spillover from Tulsa. If we’re the only one in the metro area that doesn’t have this, that’s a capability that we’re not going to have.
“I trust our police department. I am very concerned about the data, where the data is stored and how it can be potentially utilized,” Gillespie said.
Berryhill noted law enforcement databases are different than others because they are not un-siloed like a hospital database, for example, which has bill-paying processes tied to patient charts and medical histories that might leave them more vulnerable to hacking.
‘Tracking citizens’
Several citizens spoke out against implementing the Flock system, citing privacy concerns.
“The 14th Amendment said that no state shall make or enforce any law which abridges the privileges or immunities or, in other words the rights of citizens of the United States,” said David Oldham of Broken Arrow. “Nor shall they make a law which shall deprive a citizen of the right to life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
Oldham said the privacy issue at stake here was “much, much deeper than just the cameras themselves,” recalling the case where the National Security Agency had assured it was only keeping some telephone numbers of surveilled individuals. “What we found out through Edward Snowden several years later was they were holding onto this information and they were able to figure out exactly what you were doing with your life. And they knew you better than you knew yourself.
“The problem here is that this is where we are headed. We see it in China where they have social credit scores and they’re actually keeping people from all sorts of things through the use of these cameras. The cameras are just a tool to make tyranny easier.”
Broken Arrow resident Josh Stenros implored the City Council to table or vote down the agreement, saying the whole issue is about tracking citizens. “It’s about being able to take the data from a law-abiding citizen, put it into a database for 30 days or up to 2 years according to state law,” he said, noting the federal government still has wide jurisdiction to seek out private data.
“So why are we helping them?” he asked. “I’ve heard statements today about the surrounding areas doing this and we need to be good partners. Was that the case during COVID with the masks? No. We stood on our own. That was the reason that Broken Arrow thrived. We rejected the ideology that we’re going to fall into line with everybody around us.
“I don’t believe that it’s any of the government’s business to track what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis if they’re looking for somebody. How can we say that that data is wiped when we don’t control the data, and we’re giving it to a third party and that third party, at least one of them, is tied to a federal program under the executive branch of the U.S. government?”
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