The board voted unanimously last month to place bags over the monitors pending further discussion with the department and the Special Services District Authority, after Selectman Ricky Hayes argued that the public should have voted on whether to install the technology on town property.
In an interview, Mayor Barney Seney argued that the Special Services District, which approved the monitors, has complete authority over police operations.
Police Chief Christopher Ferace said that since August, the department has installed five license plate readers and two security cameras. He said the monitors were purchased under a three-year lease with the company Flock Safety. Ferace said the pilot program is entirely covered by a $70,000 state grant program that addresses auto theft and violence.
Ferace and Captain Justin Lussier, the project manager, said the monitors are still operational. The plate readers are not the same as so-called red light cameras used by some municipalities for traffic enforcement. The department said the readers are not used to issue tickets for speeding and other violations.
Lussier said the department is waiting until Monday’s meeting before making a decision on whether to bag or turn off the monitors.
Ferace and Lussier said the two Flock security cameras provide a live video feed that is monitored by dispatch. They said one, installed on the Rotary Park bandstand, will offer extra security during events and protect town property. The second, installed in the municipal parking lot, will monitor an intersection and the outside of a public restroom that has experienced vandalism.
They said the five license plate readers were placed “along the major arteries in and out of our town,” including Grove Street, Kennedy Drive, Route 44 and Woodstock Avenue.
Lussier and Ferace said the readers are designed to snap a photo of the license plate of every vehicle that passes under the camera. They said the reader only captures the front or rear bumper, and it cannot photograph inside the vehicle, nor will it capture pedestrians.
“There’s no artificial intelligence. No facial recognition. … We can't see who's driving the vehicle. All we know is that a particular vehicle passed a particular camera at a particular date and time with a particular plate,” Lussier said. “We don't know who's driving. We don't know who owns the car — that’s additional investigative work that has to be done.”
Lussier said the data collected by the readers is automatically purged after 30 days.
He said the readers can be an important investigative tool.
“We will use that as a tool to gain leads,” Lussier said. “For example, we have a missing person. They don't have a cellphone with them that we can ping. We know they left in their vehicle. We know what the plate is. We can query that license plate through the system and see if that vehicle went by any Flock LPRs (license plate readers) and that would give us a direction of travel. If they happen to go through another town that has the Flock LPRs. If that town has chosen to share their data with other local departments, we'd be able to see the path that vehicle may have been heading.”
While this technology is new for the department, Lussier said that law enforcement officers in the state have used license plate readers for over a decade.
At least 45 departments in the state have an existing partnership with Flock including the Connecticut State Police, Groton City, Groton Town, East Lyme, Ledyard, Montville, Norwich, Stonington, Waterford, the Preston Resident State Troopers Office, and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Police.
Flock has come under scrutiny from anti-surveillance advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union, who have raised concerns about how Flock’s vast data-sharing network has been used in federal immigration enforcement and abortion investigations in states where the procedure is banned, among other privacy and accountability concerns.
In the last three months, Flock said, it has removed federal agencies from its national and state lookup systems and introduced keyword filters that allow local departments to block searches from outside agencies related to immigration or reproductive health care.
According to Flock Safety’s “Transparency Portal” for the Putnam Police Department, data from the department’s flock cameras may not be used for “immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, usage based solely on a protected class (i.e. race, sex, religion), (or) personal use.”
Approximately 487 Flock partners have access to the Putnam Police Department’s data, including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and state and local departments in every state except Vermont, North Dakota, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii.
Lussier clarified that these organizations do not have access the department’s data in its entirety. Instead, Lussier said, they can only access query-specific data or Flock’s “hotlist” of vehicles that have license plates associated with stolen cars, wanted suspects and missing person investigations.
“Other agencies wouldn't just be able to see all of our data,” Lussier said. “They would have to have a case number (and) a legitimate criminal investigative reason to be able to see anything.”
“We decide who gets to potentially see any of our data,” Lussier added. “It doesn't get sold to third parties (and) Flock doesn't give it to the federal government.”
Over the last 30 days, Flock License Plate Readers in town have detected more than 94,000 unique vehicles, including 718 hits for hotlist license plates.
Lussier said that so far, the department has used the license plate readers to assist other agencies in missing persons cases and in investigating a stolen vehicle in town. While the investigation is still open, Lussier said the license plate reader snapped an image of the vehicle around the time it was stolen and documented it leaving town, which clued investigators in on the direction of the getaway.
He said the technology is still a “very new” tool for the department.
“We're still actively developing how we use it,” Lussier said.
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