Lansing City Council members passed a resolution Monday night asking Mayor Andy Schor and the Lansing Police Department to stop using Flock Safety cameras.
The non-binding resolution – which calls on the city to end existing contracts with Flock Safety and avoid entering into agreements with similar companies until a privacy impact assessment is completed and additional privacy guardrails are in place – passed 7-1, with Council President Peter Spadafore the lone vote against the resolution.
Spadafore said he was not comfortable voting for a resolution that could affect other parts of city government with just four days’ notice after Councilmember Ryan Kost waited until Friday to introduce the resolution.
The city currently uses 26 of the artificial intelligence-assisted cameras, which capture pictures of vehicles passing by to create a searchable database of license plates and other vehicle information for police.
The cameras are placed in seven spots throughout the city, which Lansing Police Chief Robert Backus said were selected based on traffic and crime patterns, with priority given to major intersections.
Some residents concerned about how the data could be used say they’ve gone out of their way to avoid the automatic license plate readers.
That’s the case for Kimberly Glass, who said she’s adjusted her routes through the city to avoid areas where she knows Flock cameras are present.
“They make me extraordinarily uncomfortable, like many of my neighbors,” Glass said. “They are a civil liberties violation because of the data collection concerns.”
But for others, like Brad Howe, the amount of information already being collected due to growing digital footprints makes it less of a concern to have their license plate logged by Flock's system.
“The cars you guys drove here collect vastly more information about your position, your movement, your direction of travel, what you’re doing, than a stationary camera ever could,” Howe said. “The cell phones you hold in your hands share your location, your actions, your contacts, search history, banking information and thousands of other personal items to every data center in the world.”
Democratic nominee for U.S. House William Lawrence, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Tom Barrett in November, said the cameras have been used in other states to assist federal agents with immigration enforcement or to investigate women seeking reproductive healthcare.
“Nobody should have access to a complete archive of any of our movement, especially not junior officials who have no authorizations, no warrant, no nothing,” Lawrence said. “That is what this technology allows for.”
Lawrence called the cameras “un-American” and said “mistrust and suspicion of arbitrary authority has been central to our country’s story from the very beginning.”
Backus said the Lansing Police Department does not share data from its Flock cameras with any other law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Our data is ours,” Backus said. “In a Flock system outside of us, you can’t even see that our Flock exists. No one makes requests for us to share data with them, because they don’t know we have it.”
Backus said the cameras have become an important tool for helping to solve crimes.
He said the cameras were instrumental in tracking down a teenager who was allegedly in possession of a parent’s firearm, which hadn’t been safely stored, as well as the suspect in a road rage incident who allegedly pulled a gun on another driver, which was on the vehicle’s dashboard when police found the suspect in their driveway.
But Lansing resident Edward Rosick said the safety benefit doesn’t justify the privacy concerns.
“Even if these cameras did work 100% of the time, which they don’t, and even if the data stored in these systems was 100% secure, which it isn’t, I still wouldn’t support them because they lay the groundwork for a Minority Report-style pre-crime surveillance state,” Rosick said.
The cameras are used primarily to find leads in investigations, Backus said, and do not track patterns.
“Unlike a phone that tracks movements and creates patterns of lives, and it does predictable wants and gives those in messages to you, we don't have that capability in this system,” Backus said. “This is not predictive policing, and there's no predictive policing component to this.”
Spadafore said he wants to see an ordinance with enforcement mechanisms to establish additional guardrails for use of the technology.
But Backus said the police department already has some guardrails in place.
He said each officer with access to the system gets their own individual login. They can be assigned different levels of access depending on the needs of their role.
While some public commenters expressed concern about the potential for officers to misuse the data, Backus said Flock flags any suspicious activity and locks that user’s account until an internal audit has been conducted.
When running a search, Backus said officers have to submit the type of offense being investigated, a case number it’s tied to and a plain-language explanation of the purpose of the search.
Department policy mandates that the cameras only be used for investigations into criminal cases. That precludes using it for civil traffic offences and immigration enforcement, Backus said.
In the past month, he said daily searches have ranged from seven to 90.
Data is stored for 30 days before being deleted, Backus said.
That’s longer than Flock’s new recommended default of one week, which Backus said is because Lansing deals with a high number of complex investigations.
“When we are looking for following up on information that trickles in sometimes at a snail's pace with these major investigations, we have 30 days that we can use this tool,” Backus said. “And I'll tell you, it's gut wrenching, and there are times, when we get information 30 days later, and this system cannot help us because at the end of 30 days, it is a complete purge of that data. We don't have access to it. There's no backdoor access to it. They can't give it to us. 30 days, and it's done.”
Councilmember Trini Pehlivanoglu said that while she may not have concerns with how the department’s current leadership uses the cameras, there will eventually be a new mayor, police chief and City Council members.
“I think that by creating an ordinance with policy and regulations around that, that does have teeth for permitted use, and then also, you know, to see if there’s anything that can be done if there is misuse in those instances, is something that I do think we should work on as a city,” Pehlivanoglu said.
Members of the advocacy group DeFlock Lansing in the audience at Monday night’s meeting held cardboard cutouts of the cameras behind the podium where public commenters speak.
Organizer John Warmb said freedom and safety are in constant conversation with one another.
“We sacrifice freedom for safety in many ways, at many different times in our lives, as individuals and as communities, just as we give up on certain ideas of safety in the name of freedom,” Warmb said. “The concerns that surround Flock Safety and AI-powered mass surveillance are real. They are backed by examples and evidence, and we are not willing to make this sacrifice any longer.”
But cameras remain the top request Backus receives from victims of violent crimes and their families, he said.
Visual evidence has also become vital for prosecutors to make their case, Backus said.
“What I think is rather ironic is that a jury of our peers, they seek it. They ask where it is, and they ask why it's not there,” Backus said. “This is our community asking for this. So, technology and visual proof is far removed from a luxury in our profession now. It's not a bonus. It's a standard, and we are required to produce it.”
