Amid nationwide controversy over the use of Flock cameras, Portage officials gave a presentation Monday on the 22 Flock cameras the city pays for.
Those cameras cover just eight intersections in Portage – U.S. 12 at County Line Road, U.S. 20 at County Line, Willowcreek and Central, U.S. 6 at County Line, U.S. 20 at Ind. 249, U.S. 6 and Willowcreek, Stone at County Line and Central at County Line, Police Chief Michael Candiano said.
Having 22 cameras for eight intersections might seem odd, but Candiano explained each camera is fixed on a pole, grabbing still photos of vehicles going in a single direction.
The only intersections with all four directions of travel covered are U.S. 6 and Willowcreek, U.S. 20 and Ind. 249, and Willowcreek and Central.
The Flock presentation came at Mayor Austin Bonta’s normal monthly “Mayor’s Monday” discussion. Bonta, Candiano and City Attorney Dan Bartnicki stressed the need for transparency, presenting facts on how the city uses Flock cameras so people with concerns about them would know more as they shape arguments either for or against use of the cameras.
Bartnicki said he, along with Bonta and Candiano, had hoped a Flock representative would attend the meeting to answer technical questions, but Flock no longer sends its people to public meetings after personal threats to its staff members’ safety.
Bonta said he’s heard all kinds of misconceptions about the cameras. One person asked him, “Can the police know what podcast we’re listening to because of Flock?” No, Bonta said, because they don’t capture sound or video, just still images of the vehicle and its license plate.
Candiano did a search of his own police car to show what the images officers see look like. There’s no facial recognition because no people inside the vehicle are visible. It’s just a closeup of the license plate paired with an image of the rear of the car.
Portage stumbled into its flock of Flocks after then-Sheriff Dave Reynolds contracted with the company to put them in the city. With the proverbial “there’s a new sheriff in town” moment, new Sheriff Jeff Balon decided the municipalities should pay for the cameras themselves instead of the county doing so.
In late 2023, after Bonta was elected mayor but before he took office, the city’s Board of Works signed a contract with Flock to pay for the cameras. Bonta and some others initially thought it was a three-year contract, but the contract covers five years, so the city is 33 months into its contract.
The five-year contract for a total of $278,250 meant saving $55,000.
If the city decides it wants to end the contract early, the City Council would have to tell the Board of Works to ask Bartnicki to look for a possible legal reason to cancel it, he said.
“For us, it was a new technology that was brought to us several years ago,” Candiano said.
Times have changed in the 24 years he’s been on the force. It used to be that officers had to write down the address they were heading to. Now they have laptops, GPS, body cameras, cellphones and other technology at their fingertips.
Police can even use social media now to track down “fools who post their crimes on social media,” Candiano said.
“For us, I believe it’s our obligation to the victims of crime to use every technology tool open to us,” he said.
“I’m not a crusader for Flock or anything like that,” Candiano said.
“I have no intention to try to sway you one way or the other,” he said.
From the list of intersections covered, it’s apparent that most are on the city’s west side. “A large portion of crime in our city comes from west of us,” Candiano said, either from Illinois or Lake County. Two-thirds of arrests in the city are nonresidents, he said.
“I’m sure there’s somebody that says eight intersections are too many,” he said, but there are lots of intersections in the city, so it would be easy for anyone wanting to avoid detection by a Flock camera to avoid the eight intersections covered.
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To the east, he said, Chesterton had cameras installed that could assist Portage officers. However, the Chesterton Town Council just voted to discontinue the contract with Flock at its Monday meeting.
The cameras are often used to help solve hit-and-run traffic cases, among many others, but Candiano stressed the cameras are just one item in the police toolbox, and cars can’t be stopped based on a Flock image alone.
The Flock system doesn’t tell who a car is registered to, for example, so a separate search is needed to find that information. Even then, it tells who owns the car, not who was driving it at the time the license plate was photographed. That takes additional investigation to figure out.
One of the safeguards Portage has put in place — and which Candiano hopes other departments will follow — is to require an incident number or case number for each search. Flock doesn’t require it, but Portage now does.
In Porter County, 911 dispatchers use their computer-aided dispatch system to assign case numbers, so if an officer makes up one to do an illegal or improper search, an audit by a division commander should be able to detect it.
Commanders have other red flags they look for, Candiano said, and Flock itself flags unusual patterns for humans conducting audits of usage to examine.
Candiano shared reasons for searches by order of frequency for the past 30 days. Of those, 18.4% were for thefts and 5.8% were for hit-and-run cases, followed by 12.7% for stolen vehicles and 11.7% for drug offenses.
“Somebody was upset that we did not have more homicide searches,” he said. “I’m glad we had only two in the last 30 days, and those we probably helping other jurisdictions.”
A Flock audit flag could show a single officer searching repeatedly for the same plate over a long period of time. Having the case number attached to each search helps prove that, in at least one case, the officer was continuing to search Flock images to see if a stolen car shows up.
A five-day “hot list” can also be set up for the same reason, having the officer alerted if a plate shows up in the future.
Images are stored on secure servers for just 30 days before being deleted, Flock says.
Bonta said he’s looking for confirmation that what Flock claims is true, including that the company’s servers have never been hacked.
Amid concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeting individuals, Candiano said the only federal agencies with access to Portage cameras’ feed are the FBI, Indiana Dunes National Park law enforcement, Indiana and Midwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task forces, Indiana Veterans Affairs Law Enforcement, Tennessee Valley Authority police, U.S. postal inspectors, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.
It’s hard to say how many cases might have been solved because of Flock cameras because the cameras alone can’t solve a case, Candiano said.
However, the cameras can help a patrolman solve a case in five minutes that might take a detective five days of visiting businesses and residents to ask to view security footage from the time of the crime, he said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.