Latest / Arizona Unscripted / Episode 18: 🌵 Arizona Unscripted - LHPD Discusses Flock Cameras!!
Transcript
- Arizona Unscripted: Welcome to Arizona Unscripted. I'm your host, Bart, alongside my wonderful co host today, Diane, Jim, and Catherine's in the background somewhere. I know she's there. But anyway, anyway, Arizona Unscripted, for those that don't know, it's it's all about Arizona. It's people, places, events, and local issues that shape our everyday lives, from small towns to our big cities, from hidden gems and great local food to history, culture, and the challenges facing our communities. We're here to have real conversations with real Arizonans. Our goal is simple. Celebrate what makes Arizona unique while bringing together voices from every corner of our state. So whether you're a lifelong resident, a newcomer, or just someone who loves Arizona, like we all do, we hope you will feel right at home. So grab a cup of coffee or something cool. Sit back and join us as we explore the people, places, and stories that make Arizona one of the most fascinating and of course we think best places in America. With that, I'm going to say hello, Diane. How are you back in the background over there? You doing good? Hey Bart. Good to see you. Welcome back. Hey, thanks. Yeah, I had a little time in Hawaii, but it's ⁓ it's a little cooler than ⁓ Arizona right now. Slightly. Yes, I'm sure it was absolutely delightful. It was it was nice. And Jim, how are you, Jim? I'm doing just fine. Excellent. I love your background, man. I love it. Someday we'll do videos. We can get all ourselves backgrounds and everything. And then today we have our co-host, ⁓ another co-host today, which is Joan. Joan McDermott. She's gonna she's gonna introduce our guest today because she has information and she wants to share with everybody and introduce it properly, better than me. So Joan, ⁓ hello to you too. Hi there. so happy to ⁓ to be on with you all. ⁓ we want to introduce ⁓ Chief Troy Sterling with the Lake Havaso City Police Department. Hey. Hi, Troy. And also Sergeant TJ Francis, who actually is in charge of the the flock ⁓ cameras here in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. And ⁓ I know there are a lot of questions in regard to those cameras, and we're going to be talking about that today. Perfect. So I would like to start if that's okay. And I I have to give TJ a promotion right here in front of you guys. All right. He He is one of my lieutenants. You're part of my command staff at ⁓ Lake House City Police Department. And ⁓ what's unique for me is I'm one of those believers in surrounding yourself with people smarter than yourself. And ⁓ in this case, ⁓ we have a lot of different ⁓ areas within our department that I like to have experts in those areas. ⁓ I used to be one of those at one time with our body worn camera program. That's not me anymore. And then TJ just happens to be one of those when ⁓ we're talking about this ⁓ automated license plate reader technology ⁓ that we're using here in Lake Avasu City. ⁓ really kind of setting the the stage for you all is I appreciate the opportunity number one just to to talk about this ⁓ you know this whole platform because it's getting a lot of attention nationwide and ⁓ even within our own state pretty heavily. And so just kind of really talk about it a little bit and ⁓ what I have noticed, I'm I'm staying up on it. The unfortunate part is a lot of the information we get is on social media. And I think ⁓ though we can probably come to a consensus and an agreement that social media isn't always the best place to get your factual information. So but with that said, there is some things out there that are that are valid and and that's part of that discussion piece, right? And so ⁓ a lot of what we're hearing about this technology is that essentially it's you know it's big brother, it's big government, you know, ⁓ tracking or surveilling our citizens. And and that's not what ⁓ people want. They feel like it's a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights and those type of things. And so ⁓ kind of backtracking on you guys where we actually started with t this technology, it's been about two years and TJ may be able to correct me, but but and Out of that two years, there was even a year prior to that where it took just the permitting process to be able to get these cameras installed along the ⁓ state route 95 corridor, because that's of course ⁓ that 100-foot mark is ⁓ eight dots right-of-way. And so to put anything in the eight dots right-of-way takes a permitting process. And if you've ever worked with ⁓ the state like that, it is it is a long process to work through that. So We were excited when we first heard about this technology because license plate readers have been around for many years. And I don't know the exact date, but it's been a long time. And I actually first heard about it from a local ⁓ company that did repossessions of vehicles. You know, they had the technology where they actually hired a person ⁓ and outfitted their vehicle with a license plate reader and that was their sole job is to drive around the community and this license plate reader would scan the vehicles that were put in the system by the financial institutions that were late on payments, right? And so they were due for repossession. And so these this company, the private company, would utilize information, find the cars, send out the the workers to go repossess it. So that's where I had first learned about it many, many years ago. And of course, notoriously, law enforcement is always behind the curve when it comes to technology. And so and so this was no exception to that. And so ⁓ a couple years ago we ⁓ started having this conversation about license plate readers. A lot of agencies had license plate readers in their patrol vehicles, and so ⁓ we also have that ⁓ by essentially a different system through Axon. Formerly known as Taser International, but Axon is who outfits our body work cameras, and they also have license plate reader in our cars. And so at that time, Axon was partnering with Flock Safety for this technology. And so that expanded the conversations with Flock Safety about stationary license plate readers that you can have in your community. Now, Flock Safety started out with. Their goal was to start in the private sector, in other words, you know, homeowners associations, ⁓ large scale retailers, ⁓ large scale retailers like Lowe's, Home Depot, those type of things, to put that technology in their hands for different reasons, and then ultimately expand that network to law enforcement, to the government. Where some of the other competitors of Flock safety have started the other way. They started in the government field, the law enforcement side, and are working towards the private sector. But ultimately, Flock seems to be the one that's getting the most attention nationwide when, you know, going back to what I said, they're not the only company out there that has this technology. That's just one platform. And so moving forward, we ultimately felt it was a ⁓ ⁓ we're always looking at technology. Lake Havasu City Police Department has always been trying to be on the lead ⁓ of having technology that helps streamline processes, helps us fulfill you know, ultimately what our mission statement is, ensuring a safe and secure community. I think when people call us, they expect us or hope that we can solve that crime. Right. And so for us, it's always about what tools are at our ⁓ at our fingertips where we can use to help streamline that process. And so we felt that this license plate rear technology was one of those things. And so ⁓ we went with ⁓ basically a a package deal where we got 10 cameras. And so Lake Adams City has 10 cameras from the south side all the way through the north side. And so ⁓ nine of those cameras are along the Highway 95 corridor. And then we have one camera that ⁓ essentially catches vehicles as they go out onto the island. So essentially there's one way out on the island and then one way back. ⁓ we don't have another camera coming back yet, ⁓ but that was our future focus, right? So we want to try out these 10 cameras and really kind of see what that does for us. What we had seen even prior to us using this technology is you guys are all familiar with Bill Williams Bridge, right? Down between you know Mojave County and La Paz County crossover there. And so La Paz County's had their camera up at Bill Williams Bridge for many years and we were constantly getting ⁓ alerts when stolen vehicles would pass their camera and it would alert us that, hey, be cautious there may be this stolen vehicle coming your way. And so our officers are like, well, why can't we have that type of technology if the neighboring, you know, county can have that? And so that's why, you know, these things just started generating that conversation and and ⁓ we dipped our toe in the water and got these 10 cameras up and running. And so That in a nutshell is how the the birth of the program occurred here in Lake Havasu. And ⁓ once we start diving into that, some of the things that ⁓ we've learned in the past, especially the last several months, ⁓ because of different things that have popped up on the radar where people start questioning this technology, really came about ensuring the safeguards are in place that it's not being misused by our officers. ⁓ That information isn't being sold, all of those different questions that people want are legitimately concerned about what's happening with that information. And so with that, I think I gave you a nice broad introduction. I would really like to turn it over to Lieutenant Francis, because he's the, like I said, the internal expert on how the program works. And he can kind of go into how it works and then what safeguards we as an agency have in place. Yeah, thanks, Chief. ⁓ can everybody hear me okay? Yeah. Perfect. ⁓ so real real quick getting into Flock. ⁓ initially what comes out are are misconceptions. ⁓ and like the chief said, a lot of people get their information from social media, and that's not the accurate place to get it. ⁓ there are some misconceptions with Flock. One is that it ⁓ it it conducts facial recognition, ⁓ it does live video. ⁓ That it actually runs ⁓ a check on the registration automatically, which isn't the case, and that it collects cell phone data as a cell phone passes by it. All those are are incorrect. All Flock does is simply take a photo of the rear of a vehicle as it passes by. Now, where these cameras are, they are located, like Chief said, they are in 10 locations throughout the city. They are on a public thoroughfare. They're in a public place. So anybody that wanted to could go in with a camera and stand exactly where Flock is and do the same thing that Flock, the Flock camera, is doing. ⁓ So, with that being said, safeguards to make sure that officers don't misuse the product. So, like Chief said, this is a tool. It's a tool to help investigators, help officers, and help the community. As far as solving crimes a lot faster. I can go on a list and maybe we'll save that for a little bit later of success stories. However, when you get Flock and you sign up with Flock, it's open range. It's they have no settings in place when you initially get it. So anybody can use it, anybody can access it as far as within the agency if they're signed up as a user. What we did is we took some steps and proactively placed some safeguards in place to one alert ⁓ the administrator, which is me, if somebody looks at a ⁓ a specific license plate, one officer looks at a specific license plate several times. It will send me an alert. It'll also send me an alert if an officer looks at a plate more than 30 Days and the extension of 30 days. So say an officer goes in and looks at this specific plate in January, then goes and looks at it in March, and then looks at it again in July. ⁓ It'll send me an alert. Now, just because it sends me an alert, that just triggers me to actually look into it. It doesn't necessarily mean anybody's doing anything wrong, but what it does do is it allows me to go in. look and see what the reason is that the officer searched. So a couple other safeguards that we have is an officer has to put in the crime or the reason for the search. They have to also assign a report number specific to that search. And that way there's some tracking mechanism for me to go in and I can look at the report. And make sure that the that plate that they searched for is associated with that crime that they categorized. So that's just a a few things that we have going. In addition, we've updated our policy or we're in the process of updating our policy to do more frequent ⁓ audits than what was originally in our policy. ⁓ so once a month, in addition to all the alerts that I get, if somebody looks at a ⁓ a license plate. ⁓ excessively, so to speak. ⁓ I will also go in and I will research five random officers and I will do an entire month of their ⁓ flock entries and I actually go in and read each report and associate that with the vehicle and the reason they conducted the search. So it's very ⁓ tedious, I guess, on on my part. It it takes quite a while, two to three hours, depending on if officers are very active on the ⁓ on on the the website. So ⁓ that that's pretty much the the safeguards and if there's of course any concern or if something is brought to my attention I can get in there and and look and knock on wood. We haven't found any misuse of the product ⁓ at this point. So yeah it's great that you continue to basically look at look for all those things that could potentially be there that people maybe are maybe are afraid they'd be there, but you're able to figure it out. Pretty pretty well. Keep it keep tabs on it. I I think ⁓ kind of piggyback on what ⁓ TJ was saying, you know, w we have a a a variety of databases that our people have access to, right? Most everything that you do has ⁓ you know, you have to put in specific credentials to be able to log in. ⁓ and so this is no different than that. You know, there's that, you know, ⁓ what do they call it, dual authentication. you know, piece where you you know you provide initial login information, then you have to have a secondary ⁓ access point. Either it's a a code or something that you have to input, right? And this was one of those databases when we first started with it that we just had it restricted to investigators and supervisors. And what we found is our sergeants or corporals on ⁓ s a squad would keep getting bombarded with ⁓ Their from their officers saying, I need to look up this plate. And so it was that you know kind of a a lot more work on the supervisors where you know if we have these appropriate safeguards in place, then why not allow the officers to have that access? We trust them with a lot of things. ⁓ we trust them with people's lives on a daily basis. And so having access to this database, as long as we have the appropriate safeguards in place. we feel comfortable with allowing them that access. And so that was where we opened it up. And I would say TJ, that's probably been within the last year probably. ⁓ maybe yeah, probably that's I'm all right. ⁓ and so yeah, and so having having those things in place, unfortunately I think you guys probably have seen the the stories ⁓ in our nation. I think ⁓ is it which state is going through it right now? Is it Wisconsin? ⁓ Georgia, yeah. Georgia, which happens to be the home of where Flock was ⁓ was birthed, I guess, is they have specific state laws in place ⁓ where utilizing that s or misusing that system results in potential criminal charges. And so you're starting to see more and more officers that have been caught misusing or abusing that system. They're being held accountable not only by the agency, but potentially by prosecutors. And so ⁓ that's no different. in Arizona, we're treating this we you know, as chiefs of police, we recognize that ⁓ there's gonna be additional safeguards mandated by law probably coming next year. And so this is a hot topic ⁓ in our state and we're fully aware that ⁓ yeah there probably should be additional safeguards on it. We're not opposed to that. ⁓ but we don't want to lose such a great tool that we've been gonna utilize in our criminal investigations. And so coming up with those compromises on what it will be after a certain amount of time before you can look up ⁓ some type of ⁓ information, then maybe you need a search warrant, you know. So trying to come up with what that timeline looks like ⁓ to be able to continue to utilize that tool, I think those are all appropriate pieces of that conversation that will will be occurring in the legislature this next year. And and then a a big piece of that is ⁓ creating the law that establishes that guideline of what happens when somebody does misuse it, right? We already have those in place for sieges ⁓ related our officers have their computers in their cars, they can run names, cars, you know, license plates at the at their fingertips at a moment's notice, right? So this is no different than that. But they're held to a standard because they have to get certified every two years on that system to be able to utilize that and maintain their certification. So it's just, you know, talking about that whole trust trust factor, there's a lot to that. And so ⁓ you know, hearing the arguments out there of taking away people's Fourth Amendment rights and violating their privacy by surveilling them, ⁓ that's not necessarily an accurate depiction because all this system is doing is creating it's a snapshot. of the rear of that vehicle. Now, yes, I think we all agree that AI could be a scary component to any technology nowadays. ⁓ but what AI is allowing us to do is be able to make that a searchable ⁓ picture now, right? And so when we have a crime and we know that it's a black Mercedes that that and we don't have any other information, we can still utilize the system To look for black Mercedes in that time frame and potentially pull up some vehicles of interest of that. That doesn't eliminate the investigator side of this, right? They still have to do old-fashioned police work and match, you know, match the clues together to form, hey, is this our car or not? Right. And so it has nothing to do with tracking people. It's tracking or giving us a snapshot of that vehicle. And then now we put the other pieces together. Sometimes we're very fortunate. with you know people do want to get involved and they do get involved with assisting us. I'm a big component of ⁓ solving crime is not just the police officers responsibility. That's us as people, right? That's that's our community's responsibility. You know, the the public are the police, the police are the public. We're in this together, folks. And so you know sometimes we get witnesses that come forward say, yes, I got the plate for that vehicle that just committed this armed robbery. Great, we can utilize that type of information to plug it into a system like this and we can potentially see that it passed a point ⁓ it past the north end of town so it's probably heading to you know california or kingman so let's notify the appropriate authorities in those jurisdictions and try to get ahead of it and so that's where that come becomes a a tool for us to be able to speed up our investigations and so that I guess you know kind of went on a little bit. I'm I'm hoping maybe there's some additional questions that you guys may have that between TJ and I we can help answer. Yeah I have a question. ⁓ from what I understand With Flock, there's like a when you want to access ⁓ the ⁓ the data, there's a like a drop down menu that you can you can select what the category is that you're going to be searching for. Is that familiar? There so there's there's several drop-down menus. There's one of of the crime in particular on what what's the reason you are looking for this. Then there's also drop downs on, okay, if if you're looking for like the chief said. if a witness says a black Mercedes and this happened on the south side of town, we're gonna check the south side cameras for black Mercedes within that time frame. And yeah, so we can we can there's a drop down menu on vehicle make, there's a drop down menu on vehicle color, ⁓ a and and so on. So Jim. So how how do they get the ⁓ data from the camera to to where you guys get it at? Is it a modem right by the camera or does it go through a cell tower? How how does it get the sure? Yeah, it's it's the photo is taken and then stored in a cloud. And we have access to the cloud where we can get in and and search the specific parameters that we're looking for. Now everything that's held in the cloud is only held for 30 days and then it automatically gets deleted. We can't access it. Flock can't access it. We can't even we can't get to it. It gets purged after 30 days. Does anybody else have access to that cloud other than you guys? Or is it encrypted or it so it is encrypted. ⁓ I I think I saw a question that popped up was something about hackers. So Flock has never been hacked. ⁓ they have they have encrypted data just like a CGIS does, just like Axon and Motorola and all these other major companies that store information for law enforcement. Flock is no different in this in this aspect. Well, it sounds like you have a lot of safeguards in place. My gosh. Seems like it's very well thought out. There there are many safeguards and and actually there's more there's probably more safeguards in this flock system that we have than there are in a lot. And I think a lot of that is public concern. And it's such a great tool that we want to be able to show the public that, hey, we are doing absolutely everything we can to maintain the trust and still use it as an effective tool. I know that Daniel has a ⁓ sorry, go ahead, Jim. Do you have some good stories you can tell us about how how ⁓ these systems worked out right for you? Absolutely. ⁓ just just to name a a couple of us. So the ⁓ the Calvary Baptist arson, where the guy breached the the door, caught the place on fire, he shot the shot the lock off with a gun, caught Calvary Baptist on fire and then fled and headed south. ⁓ We were able to get the vehicle description by the surveillance video of the church. Then we were able to input what we saw in that video, put it into the flock system, and we were able to, within three minutes of the arson, we were able to see a vehicle matching that description head south of town. So we were able to obviously with further investigation, figure out who that was, identify who that person was, and contact the agency where he was actually from, which I believe was New Mexico. Get a background on him, get him identified, and so on. And then that's how we were able to find the suspect in that case. ⁓ That's a great story. Wow that's a good one. Absolutely. Just just real quick, another one is ⁓ we had an attempted murder. We had a guy who shot at somebody at Body Beach. We had a vehicle description. We knew what vehicle it was because of who he was associated with. And by the use of license plate readers, we were able to locate that vehicle that night and take the suspect into custody. And these are these are just, like I said, really quick examples, but these are investigations that would have taken weeks, if not months, to actually get somebody into custody and get them in the judicial system and prosecuted. And we're doing it, we're doing it in in a couple hours. That's impressive. That's really impressive. But I know that we are closing in on our time here. Daniel, I know has a question or a comment that he would like to share. And then I have a question before we wrap up. Daniel, yes. I I know that you described your flock cameras, however. I know that there are others that do take photos that don't blur out. They can take pictures from the front, from the side, from all kinds of directions. So I know you're describing what you use right now. People are concerned that that can change rapidly with software, with putting up more cameras, and that these same conditions don't exist. So that's a thought and a concern. And their concern is, I know you say after thirty days it's gone, but if s ⁓ there's still concerns over larger government agencies getting the downloads and then they've just got it. It doesn't say that theirs is ever gonna go away once they get it. So there's all kinds of questions that some of us have beyond the system that you currently have at the moment, just to know that those are concerns. Yeah, I can I kind of take that, Daniel. ⁓ so it those are valid ⁓ questions. ⁓ one of them is I'm sure there is different platforms ⁓ from different companies. In other words, I think ⁓ TJ the the platform that we're using is Flock Falcon. Is that sound correct? Yes. Okay, so that we're using the Falcon platform. And so all it is is essentially it is a camera. And so it it flashes a picture of the rear of a vehicle. as it passes that camera. Are there other ones? There's a multitude of different types of cameras. Obviously we have speed cameras that exist. There are cameras out there that have facial recognition technology, which that's kind of a big debate in our country as well right now. And it has been misused as well. And so ⁓ but what we currently are are there other platforms out there? Yes sir there are. ⁓ That's not our intention to to utilize those and and And I don't think that's probably a a smart decision at the moment based on the narrative that's that's out there, right? I think there is a a a time and a place for those, but the biggest thing with any of this is the use of artificial intelligence involved in these platforms. And that's where as a society we have to come up with these appropriate safeguards to make sure that it's not ⁓ abused and it affects innocent people, right? ⁓ and so and that's where, you know. We've had officers in ⁓ in law enforcement not take all the investigative steps necessary where they've pulled over wrong vehicles, they've made false arrests based on just a license plate reader hit, right? That's not appropriate, right? We have to do our due diligence and make sure all the pieces line up, ⁓ just like we would in any other case. And so it's just another piece of the puzzle is that I always like to use ⁓ for our investigative work. ⁓ sorry, Daniel, the second part of it is ⁓ that's probably the sharing of the data. ⁓ TJ can probably hit on that ⁓ a little bit or or piggyback off of me, but essentially each agency owns the data. And so as an agency, we have the ability to share with the agencies that we feel like we want to share with. So ⁓ a lot of times that's based on request. We may get an agency that requests ⁓ access to our system because they're searching for a homicide suspect. Maybe they're in New Mexico. And so ⁓ the flock systems ⁓ are able to if we allow them to search our ten cameras that we could allow that access and they could see if that vehicle did pass through our jurisdiction. ⁓ and so that that is truly a possibility. One of the biggest ones was ⁓ people will have the fear that Agencies are sharing their information with federal agencies like ICE, right? That's that was a big ⁓ hot topic as well. And and so each agency is a little bit different. So I can't answer for all of them. I can just tell you what ours is and and TJ can answer that as far as who we share with. Yeah, so we do not to I I guess I'll just make it very brief. We do not share with any federal agencies. They do not have access to our data. And it's actually in our flock contract that Flock does not share or sell any data that they collect off of our cameras. So ⁓ I hope that that answers your question and kind of settles the ease a little bit, but we do not share any of our data ⁓ with any federal agency. Thank you. Yes. That's great. Well, thank you both so much for being here today. ⁓ we really appreciate it. I know some of the questions that I've been getting you all answered already today. So ⁓ I do appreciate that because we want to help assist you, but also be good stewards in our community of this information and ⁓ help to calm some of the fears that are out there. So thank you very much. ⁓ I appreciate the repeat visit ⁓ on our behalf and it means a lot to us. So thank you very much. And With that, we are gonna close out this segment and then we are gonna go into our next one. Thank you for having us. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Al. Appreciate it.