Dozens of Newport residents poured into city hall Wednesday, full of questions and concerns about the city’s potential purchase of Flock cameras. Currently, the police are testing 17 of these automated license plate readers throughout the city.
“I know that some of our commissioners are here and I want them to be listening,” said Newport-based defense attorney Jacqueline Mayer Grant during public comment. “If you could just go ahead and say that you don’t want Flock, that would be great right now.”
An eruption of cheers followed.
The Newport Police Department called the public meeting to offer information on their current use of the technology from Flock Safety. Cities nationwide have been using Flock cameras to scan license plate numbers and register other vehicle information.
This is not the first time the police department has talked about the cameras, but on Wednesday, a representative of the company was present to answer questions as well.
Newport Police Department Captain Kevin Drohan said Flock had extended the city’s trial period.
“We spoke with the Flock representative about the transparency of this program [and] that we wanted to extend it,” Drohan said in response to a resident asking how the agreement was extended. “We spoke to them and they agreed to extend it until we came to an agreement with the public and the commission.”
Residents' concerns were mainly about how Flock Safety stores the data and who has access to it. Most were from Newport but some came from neighboring cities. Conner Paul, a cyber security engineer, lives in Bellevue but said he came to represent the opposition.
“So despite Flock’s claims, their physical infrastructure is not secure and can be proven,” Paul said. “They will often talk about their cloud environment, and they say ‘our cloud's never been hacked.’ Not yet.”
Flock Safety Public Affairs representative Kerry McCormack said the company has responded to system failures as they come, but no private data has been hacked. Drohan said per the current city agreement, data deletes after 30 days unless it is being used in an active criminal investigation.
Many residents brought up the Fourth Amendment which protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy. Multiple residents said the Supreme Court has made no decisions on the legality of automated license plate readers specifically and the city should wait.
“Why are we in such a rush to move forward with this as opposed to taking a step back and taking a more responsible and prudent approach?” asked West Side resident Kyle Randall.
Though nothing has been decided on automated license plate readers, a recent Supreme Court decision ruled that geofence warrants could not be used for broad investigations. Rather, police must have probable cause to access data from a specific person.
The decision was specifically about when police can issue a warrant to access a person’s location history through their cell phone. The Supreme Court decided that even if cell phone location data exists, individuals still have a reasonable expectation of privacy as they go on about their day.
“Our legal team believes that the most recent court ruling specific to cell phone data and geofencing does not apply to ALPRS,” McCormack said, using an acronym for automated license plate readers.
Kentucky legislators had passed their own bill earlier this year regulating automatic license plate cameras, including their permitted uses, data retention times, open records policies and compliance violations.
The Newport police department says for now, they’re still testing the technology. They haven’t made plans to present a potential contract to city commissioners — or said when the free trial period of the currently installed cameras will end.
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