FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — In the last month alone, Fresno police license plate readers captured more than a million different vehicles, according to the department’s new online transparency portal.
Those images come from 79 cameras across the city, all made by a private company called Flock Safety. But when the city’s contract with Flock, worth more than $1.5 million, ends in February, it won’t be renewed.
“Although Flock is a great investigative tool, there’s no question it is very apparent that the safeguards that they have put in place have not proven to be effective,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said at a news conference Friday.
Dyer said Fresno has used license plate readers for more than 15 years and never had a problem with unauthorized agencies accessing its data before Flock.
“So this is something I would say is very unique to the Flock system,” Dyer said.
“When we look back at records over the first few years Flock was in operation, we noticed sharing had occurred outside of our agreements with other California agencies,” Casto said.
Casto said Fresno’s data was also accessible to out-of-state law enforcement agencies that the department never approved. Some of those out-of-state searches listed immigration as the reason, but Casto said they were run by local agencies and that none came from ICE or the federal government.
“However, no record exists in the Flock system to prove whether the agency changed the setting or if Flock software defaulted and caused the settings to be something other than what our agency intended,” Casto said.
The city still plans to use license plate readers. Dyer said a contract with a new company could go before the City Council in December.
Last week, the city posted the police department’s license plate reader policy online, along with a link to a new transparency portal. That link takes residents to a page hosted on Flock’s website.
The page includes a “Myth vs. Fact” section written by Flock. It says each agency controls access to its own data and that “nothing is shared automatically.”
The portal also lists cases where police say license plate readers helped. On Oct. 3, detectives used the system to identify vehicles tied to a robbery and homicide, leading to six suspects. On Sept. 4, officers were alerted that a domestic violence suspect’s vehicle had passed a camera about two hours after the victim reported the attack, and they found and arrested him nearby. The portal also credits the system with helping solve two fatal hit-and-run crashes in June and July.
According to the portal, the city’s original Flock contract provided 85 cameras, but some were stolen or vandalized and never replaced. A contract amendment provided 48 more cameras that have not been installed. The page also says Fresno police no longer share license plate data with any other agencies and have suspended sharing until they update agreements.
A city report also shows a Fresno police officer is under internal investigation for allegedly abusing access to Flock data. The report from the city’s Office of Independent Review says the officer is also accused of searching a state law enforcement database for something not connected to a case and of not turning on a body camera during a traffic stop. The case was opened in September and was still open at the end of that month.
Casto said that over the past five years, four department employees have been fired and four more resigned instead of being fired over allegations of improper database access.
“This is data that should not be misused. We take it seriously, and we will continue to investigate that case until we come to a preponderance of evidence of whether something was misconduct or not,” Casto said.
“We warned the Fresno Police Department during the community meeting that they held that they were going to have issues with misuse and misconduct, and they continuously reassured us that that was not going to be an issue,” Reilly said.
Reilly said he wasn’t surprised to learn of the investigation.
“They were very quick to dismiss the issues that we brought up about potential misuse, despite misuse happening in other police departments around the country,” Reilly said.
Reilly said residents should have a say in whatever system the city chooses next.
“I think that the citizen should be involved in deciding what product and what level of surveillance they are willing to accept,” Reilly said.
The first Flock cameras went up in Fresno nearly three years ago. On Thursday, Councilmember Nick Richardson will introduce an ordinance he says would create the city’s first citywide rules for license plate readers.
The proposal would bar any future vendor agreement from giving another agency or a national database default access to Fresno’s data unless the city expressly authorizes it. It would also ban facial recognition, prohibit vendors from using the city’s data for their own purposes and require officers to give a specific reason for every search. The ordinance calls for annual audits but does not require the city to make those audits public.
“If you’d like to summarize that, it essentially would say, don’t flock with Fresno,” Richardson said Friday.
Community advocate Matthew Gillian said the problem goes beyond any one company.
“The real problem with what we’ve seen with the Flock is that the access to the data has been abused, and we don’t see a lot of regulation around how it’s implemented,” Gillian said.
Gillian said residents want to be part of the conversation before the city signs with another vendor.
“For so long, this city has operated without having these conversations… without including the public,” Gillian said. “But we are willing and want to have these long, hard conversations.”
Three other Valley law enforcement agencies turned over the same kind of Flock records to ABC30 within 10 days of our requests. Fresno has had ABC30’s requests for a month and still hasn’t released them, and the city attorney’s office has not responded to questions about the delay.
Click here for video story from ABC 30.
