"I would say come back to us with a combination of answers to some of the questions we've raised, as well as some possible options for us to consider to strike a better balance in terms of controls over privacy, while at the same time maintaining as much as possible the benefits of the program for our law enforcement," Councilmember Dan Brotman said.
Glendale's 82 Flock cameras spread throughout the city generate 1.2 million license plate reads per month, William said. The city has also paid and permitted for 40 additional Flock cameras, which have not yet been deployed.
William provided a presentation to the council on the Glendale Police Department's use of the ALPR technology, addressing questions and qualms from the community and council, as well as explaining how California Senate Bill 34 governs the use and sharing of Flock data.
"When the government uses powerful technology, people should ask questions about privacy, access, and the potential of misuse; those are legitimate questions, and we have a responsibility to answer them, but those conversations also need to be grounded in facts," William said. "No technology or policy can make misuse impossible. What we can do is limit access, require a legitimate law enforcement purpose, use audits, and hold people accountable when those rules are violated."
The Flock technology does capture a still photo of the driver's rear license plate and vehicle when triggered by motion sensors, dates and timestamps each photograph, providing police with an extra tool for identifying a suspect’s vehicle. What it does not do, the chief said, is record video or audio, issue traffic tickets, measure a driver's speed, live monitoring or track a vehicle's movement.
"All this does is it gives us some sort of a lead to work off of to put a case together. We have a long list of success stories, but we've used this technology to solve homicides, we've used them for armed robberies, home break-ins, carjackings, shootings, fraud, other serious crimes. We've used it for less serious crimes," William said, adding that GPD has used Flock to identify vehicles doing doughnuts on Glenoaks Boulevard.
In the past six months, within the category of crimes including burglaries, robberies, grand theft auto, and carjacking, GPD has made 126 arrests, of which 83% were of individuals who don't live in Glendale, William said. About 14 of those arrests were "direct hits" from Flock.
Regarding who decides where the Flock cameras are located in Glendale, typically the Special Investigations Bureau lieutenant gathers input from detectives, investigators, and crime analysts, and delivers it to command staff where a final decision is made, William said.
"Some of the factors we take into consideration are locations and patterns of reported criminal activity, investigative needs and known crime trends, traffic patterns and roadways characteristics, areas where ALPR may provide significant investigative benefit and input from personnel and knowledge of ongoing investigations," he said.
Responding to the question of how many additional cameras there are in the city that are not operated by GPD but feed into the system, William said he does not know the exact number. He added that the Americana at Brand and Glendale Galleria own and use Flock cameras to manage parking.
Outside of those "two entities," William said there's other ALPR technology within the city's parking infrastructure.
William said a homeowners association purchased one of two Flock cameras in the College Hills neighborhood of Glendale. However, data from both cameras is only accessible by the GPD.
He added that GPD has received multiple requests from other homeowners associations requesting that the city or association itself purchase a Flock camera for the neighborhood.
"The association and the residents in that neighborhood felt that there was another point of access into the community. They requested for the city to put a second camera, which we didn't, and then they went ahead and purchased that second camera themselves."
According to SB 34 and GPD's department policy, William said the police department can only share its Flock data with other state and local law enforcement agencies, but not outside of California or with federal agencies. The bill also prohibits the use of Flock technology for reproductive health care and immigration enforcement.
He added that access to Glendale's Flock data by other state agencies may be "modified or revoked" at any time by GPD.
Partner agencies request to establish a data sharing relationship through Flock and the chief of police or a designee approves it. That agency is then listed on GPD's transparency portal, the chief said. Currently, he added, partner agencies may use the data for any official criminal investigation.
"There's no additional limitations on the category of investigations. I know that's been a topic of conversation, that, 'Can we modify that?' Yes, that is an ability that Flock is working on," he said.
To answer the question of what "irrevocably deleted" means, William said Flock data is transferred to Amazon Web Services GovCloud where it is stored for 30 days according to GPD's set retention rate, and then automatically deleted following that period.
"Once that deletion happens, the deletion does leave an auditable trace. So there is a mechanism to ensure that the data has been deleted," the chief said, adding that GPD has never seen Flock data become available beyond the 30-day retention period, when conducting a query to search data.
Beyond third-party audits, GPD conducts in-house audits every two weeks. So far, according to GPD's audits, the agency has not found any instances of misuse of Flock data within itself. William added that Flock also has its own auditing system to detect "abnormal activity."
If GPD does detect misuse of its Flock data within the agency, it conducts an internal affairs investigation to determine the proper course of action, which could lead to discipline including termination, and in some cases, criminal offense. If misuse is detected coming from a partner agency, William said, GPD can revoke access to its Flock network immediately, and would later refer the case to the Department of Justice.
"I want to emphasize that the customer data is scrubbed of all the metadata that's available. Meaning, the license plate information itself is not available, but just the characteristics of that vehicle and what the license plate looks like," William said.
