Portage Councilman Ferdinand Alvarez wants to get Flock cameras out of town.
The city’s police department uses the cameras at eight intersections, where they read license plates on cars.
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Mayor Austin Bonta said Tuesday that video of the lengthy presentation at a public forum on Flock cameras in the city held last month would be posted online soon on the police department’s Flock transparency website.
There was a technical glitch during the event. The video was recorded, but without audio during the introduction and the first few slides. “We didn’t want to send out a video with my lips moving and no sound coming out,” Police Chief Michael Candiano said.
Fixing it meant recording new audio of that missing section to splice into the recording so it would make sense to viewers.
“It’s probably 2.5 hours long,” Candiano warned the council.
The public forum was held in the wake of growing regional and national concerns about privacy and the misuse by police of data collected by the license plate readers. The Porter County, Chesterton and Michigan City police departments, among others, grappled with misuse, or allegations of misuse, of the readers by their officers.
The Chesterton Town Council voted to discontinue using the system at the end of this month.
Alvarez, D-At-large, asked a series of questions about Flock at Tuesday’s council meeting, some of which were answered at last month’s public forum. About 30 people attended that forum.
He asked city attorney Dan Bartnicki what would happen if the city decides to cancel the contract. The city is paying $55,000 annually for the Flock cameras. The contract expires in 2028.
Bartnicki said he would have to look into what grounds the city might have to terminate it early. If there aren’t sufficient grounds to do so, the city might be stuck paying for the cameras even if it decides not to use them.
Bonta said there are misconceptions about the city’s Flock cameras, including concerns about facial recognition, how far back police can search, why they don’t enforce speeding and more.
The cameras take still photos, not video, so there’s no way to measure speed. The photos are a close-up of the license plate and the back of the car, so no faces are visible. After 30 days, the photos are deleted from the database.
They can’t issue automatic citations for running a red light, either.
Nor do they tell who owns a vehicle, let alone who is driving. Once police officers get a license plate from a photo, they have to search the Bureau of Motor Vehicles database to see who registered the vehicle.
Alvarez asked if the city could turn off the cameras.
“We would have to look at the actual functionality of the cameras,” Bartnicki said. Legally, it’s already ruled that the cameras are constitutional, he added.
“Courts are starting to deal with how the data from Flock cameras can be used constitutionally,” said Councilman Collin Czilli, D-5th.
“Whether or not we’re going to stop paying Flock is a contractual issue,” he said.
Portage was one of the first cities in the area to require an officer to enter a case number to look up a license plate, Bonta said. Those case numbers are generated by the dispatch center’s computer-aided dispatch system, Candiano explained.
“We’ve had about 34,000 cases this year, and they’re all sequential,” Candiano said.
“If it’s not a law enforcement function, that’s where they’re getting in trouble” doing a search, Candiano said.
Websites like haveibeenflocked.com appear to have old data based on Freedom of Information Act and Access to Public Records Act requests, he said.
Candiano explained how multiple searches for the same vehicle can happen. Say there’s a home invasion in Valparaiso and the vehicle was seen heading in Portage’s direction. Officers on duty at that time could each do multiple searches, five or 10 minutes apart, looking for that vehicle. Each search by each officer would add up quickly.
Candiano cited another case. He was off duty when a St. John man with dementia was believed to be in the Portage area. Candiano listened to the police radio traffic reporting the man’s car being spotted at various locations through Flock searches. Candiano was able to find him at a gas station on U.S. 20. That plate could have been run 40 times during the incident, Candiano said.
“What is it worth? I don’t know, saving someone’s life, solving a murder? Where do you draw the line?” he asked.
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Czilli gave the city credit for holding the Flock town hall and building the transparency portal in the wake of complaints nationwide about the cameras.
“I still have questions about whether or not these things are constitutional,” he said, adding that Flock isn’t helping itself, making it harder and harder to justify the cost, “when they are not doing anything to help themselves in this situation.”
The city invited Flock to send a representative to that public forum, but the company declined, saying it wanted to protect its employees from hostile critics.
Alvarez made a motion to turn off the Flock cameras. It failed for lack of a second.
“I don’t know if this body has that authority,” Bonta said.
“This is a motion to put bags over the cameras,” Bartnicki said.
“We’re talking about directing the police department to stop using the cameras,” Czilli said.
Critics have cited privacy concerns over the Flock cameras. With a car or GPS, users choose to be tracked, he said, but not with license plate readers.
“I am concerned about the direction this is going,” Bonta said. “What we have been doing is reviewing our policy.”
“What concerns me is what happens when the contract is up and if we are told we have to upgrade to this,” he said, as well as Flock not doing public presentations.
“I myself have the utmost confidence in our Portage Police Department,” said Councilman Bob Parnell, R-2nd. Used appropriately, the cameras are a good thing, he said.
“I put our police department through the wringer in how we use them,” Bonta said. At the suggestion of Councilwoman Gina Giese-Hurst, D-1st, he’s planning future public forums on the topic so people who couldn’t attend the first one could attend one of the other sessions.
“I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this discussion,” Alvarez said.
“Neither do I,” Bonta said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.