The St. Mary’s Point City Council voted 4-1 in June to spend $10,000 a year in COVID funds to install the Flock Safety license-plate readers.
“You listen to the news, and crime is increasing,” said City Clerk/Administrator Cindie Reiter. “We have heard of a lot of petty crimes being committed out in the area.”
City officials hope the Flock Safety Falcon cameras – which will be identified by signs informing motorists that they are being recorded – will act as a deterrent to anyone considering committing a crime in the city, pop. 360. The cameras will not be used for speed-limit enforcement, they say.
But groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have raised concerns about automated license-plate readers, saying Flock and other mass-surveillance systems have severe privacy implications.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project based in Washington, D.C., said communities like St. Mary’s Point should think twice before installing the cameras.
“What is the overall effect on the community?” he said. “What are the side effects that may not make a news headline, but may be changing the quality of life in a neighborhood? It’s not just criminals who will look at that and say, ‘Huh, they’re recording where I’m going right now.’ It’s everybody who is going to have to think about it. People may have things in their private life that are complicated, and they may not want to live life feeling that they are being recorded everywhere they go. … You can’t deter criminals without watching everybody.”
LITTLE INPUT
Some residents of St. Mary’s Point didn’t learn about the City Council’s decision to purchase the cameras until after the June meeting minutes were published online.
“I’m concerned that they didn’t solicit more input from us,” said Peter Quinn, who’s lived in St. Mary’s Point for 30 years. “Ten thousand dollars a year might not seem like much, but we’re a small community. I’d rather see the money spent a little differently. We have a little park here with a swing set and a baseball diamond, and it seems like upgrading that would be a better use of the funds.”
Steve Popovich, the city’s mayor from 1990 to 2004, said the city council should have surveyed residents before the vote. “People felt that it was kind of railroaded through without community input,” he said.
When the city council considered putting in a controversial water system in the early 1990s, they conducted a survey of residents, he said. More than 80 percent of the respondents said it wasn’t needed, so the council didn’t move forward with the plan.
“This council didn’t do that,” Popovich said. “When it’s something controversial, even though they’re officials elected to speak on behalf of the residents, sometimes they really need to reach out to the residents to find out where they stand.”
Both Popovich and Quinn said they plan to attend the St. Mary’s Point City Council meeting on Tuesday. Although the camera purchase isn’t an item on the agenda, the topic is expected to come up during public comments, Reiter said.
FLOCK SYSTEMS
A spokeswoman for Flock Safety, based in Atlanta, said the license-plate readers are helping communities and law enforcement in more than 2,000 cities in more than 40 states, including Madison, S. D., where the readers last week helped catch two suspects driving stolen cars within 24 hours. One of the cars had been stolen in Monticello, Minn., which is a four-hour drive from Madison, according to Dakota News Now.
Flock has about a dozen customers in Minnesota, said Holly Beilin, the company’s head of content and communications.
Here’s how the solar-powered, motion-activated Falcon cameras work:
They identify and take a snapshot of the critical details of a vehicle that passes by it. According to the company, the cameras capture the make, vehicle type, color, license plate (full, partial or missing), state of the license plate, and various vehicle features, including damage and after-market alterations.
The readers communicate with Flock like a cellphone and have a battery pack so they can perform 24/7 in any weather, Beilin said.
St. Mary’s Point’s new security-camera access policy, written by City Attorney Kevin Sandstrom, addresses the use of Flock cameras. “Cameras are not installed for the purpose of monitoring the general public,” the policy states.
Information about the license plates would not be accessed unless or until a crime was committed in the city, said Reiter, who is the sole responsible authority for data practice in the city and the only person allowed to access the Flock Safety information.
“Someone from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office would have to request the data, and then I would search the system,” Reiter said.
Another safeguard in place to ensure the technology is not misused: All data will be deleted from the system after 30 days, she said.
To protect voter privacy, the city’s policy states that cameras located within 1,000 feet of the city’s polling place will be covered on Election Day and then uncovered when the election is complete, Reiter said.
With Ring and Nest video-security systems in use throughout the area, people are used to being on camera, said Reiter, who lives in neighboring Lake St. Croix Beach. “They’re not uncommon,” she said. “It’s the world we live in.”
The city has entered into a one-year agreement with Flock, with the ability to re-up for a year, Reiter said. The cost for the first year of service is $11,000, which covers the cameras and installation. The cost for the second year would be $10,000, she said.
The city received about $42,800 in COVID funds, and that money can be used for public-safety purposes, she said. The council has not yet decided how to spend the other half of the money, she said.
PRIVACY CONCERNS
Jason Kelley, associate director of digital strategy on the activism team for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sent a letter to St. Mary’s Point highlighting privacy concerns. Founded in 1990, the San Francisco nonprofit organization “defends civil liberties and privacy in the digital arena,” he said.
“Regardless of the effectiveness of catching the occasional criminal, (the cameras) will catch every driver who goes in and leaves the city — every single one,” he said. “That’s a pretty wide dragnet to cast on every local resident just for the sole sake of occasionally hoping to get a hit on someone who broke into a car, for example. … My impression is that this is not a crime-ridden area.”
EFF has raised concerns about the length of time Flock stores the data. It has sponsored a bill in California which would limit data-retention periods for license-plate readers to 24 hours, unless they are on a hotlist, Kelley said.
According to Washington County sheriff’s records shared with the Pioneer Press, the only crime reported in St. Mary’s Point so far this year was an incident involving fraud. Two crimes – one for fraud and one for domestic assault – were reported in 2021, records show.
The sheriff’s office used to use automated license-plate readers in its squad cars, but discontinued using them last year because the technology was out of date, said Chief Deputy Doug Anschutz. Officials have not yet decided whether they will ever be used again, he said.
Anschutz and other county officials met with St. Mary’s Point officials earlier this year to discuss the city’s potential use of Flock cameras. “It was the first meeting we’d had with a city about a city actually purchasing cameras through Flock,” Anschutz said.
The sheriff’s office provides law-enforcement services to the city as part of a five-city joint contract that includes Afton, Lake St. Croix Beach, Lakeland Shores and Lakeland.
The total annual cost for the Lower St. Croix Valley Police Services contract is $481,180. Afton pays the lion’s share – $216,579 a year, or 45 percent; St Mary’s Point pays $27,619, or about 6 percent, according to the sheriff’s office.
“We’re not advocating for (Flock cameras), and we are not advocating against them,” Anschutz said. “If that’s something the city wants to do, then it’s something that the city can do.”
Brent Wartner, First Assistant at the Washington County Attorney’s office, said the attorney’s office is working with the sheriff’s office to determine what their responsibilities will be in regards to any type of cameras used in Washington County. “We just don’t know the answer to that yet,” he said. “We’re certainly reviewing the matter and the information that we have received from St. Mary’s Point.”
NEW VISITORS
During the pandemic, a number of new visitors came to the area in and around St. Mary’s Point, especially the public beach at Lake St. Croix Beach, said St. Mary’s Point City Council member Beth Olfelt-Nelson, who has served on the city council since 2015.
“These communities experienced a large influx of day visitors, and so there has been heightened activity and some heightened issues around car thefts in this five-city area,” she said. “There is a porous connection of small cities. It is weird to think about them in isolation.”
Olfelt-Nelson said the council will revisit the issue after a year to see whether the Flock program should be continued. “Given some of the concerns that other council members were hearing, we thought it was worth exploring,” she said.
Hiring another deputy to patrol the city would cost about $150,000 a year, according to city officials.
Flock cameras are a much lower-cost alternative, she said. “Given that (the deputies) are primarily in patrol cars and they come and go, this is a way that we can explore whether technology can be a supportive adjunct to the officers and their patrols.”
She stressed that access to the data will be highly restricted.
“I don’t have access to the data; no one on the council has access to the data,” she said. “Our clerk is the only one who has access to the data – she’s our guardian. If there is reason to access the data, we have to log the reasons. There is a policy, and it’s quite restrictive. Information will be shared with law enforcement only if there’s an incident.”
Olfelt-Nelson said she hopes the cameras – and the accompanying signs letting motorists know that they are being recorded – will make would-be thieves think twice about targeting the city. “I would hope that the signs alone would be a deterrent,” she said.
The ACLU’s Jay Stanley said communities and homeowners associations that use Flock cameras should be concerned about data breaches.
“When you have honeypots of sensitive personal information, it attracts hacking,” he said. “I’m sure that Flock and St. Mary’s Point have fine I.T. workers working for them, but it’s just really, really hard to defend a cyber-asset, especially one that is full of rich, personal information where there could be a reason for bad actors to want access to it.”
Stanley said he is optimistic that communities will eventually reject the use of mass-surveillance technology like license-plate readers.
“There is lag when people’s privacy is threatened or lost and when they become aware of it,” he said. “I think that over time, people will demand the right to live a life free of government and corporate scrutiny — the way that Americans have always lived. … When driving down the street, living your own life, not committing any crimes, there is no reason why governments and companies should be storing records of your comings and goings.”
To protect voter privacy, the city’s policy states that cameras located within 1,000 feet of the city’s polling place will be covered on Election Day and then uncovered when the election is complete, Reiter said.“When you have honeypots of sensitive personal information, it attracts hacking,” he said. “I’m sure that Flock and St. Mary’s Point have fine I.T. workers working for them, but it’s just really, really hard to defend a cyber-asset, especially one that is full of rich, personal information where there could be a reason for bad actors to want access to it.”
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