Interim Police Chief Capt. Dale Plessas presented a contract with Flock Safety for $61,500 for two years to utilize the company’s equipment to monitor traffic. Cameras likely would be installed around the edges of town and in strategic locations, according to information at the meeting.

Council member Mike Blessum said such a system trades freedom for safety.

“This is a law enforcement tool that theoretically can make us a little bit safer on the streets. But what are we giving up?” he said. “I have a serious civil liberties concern about where this is headed, and I want to head it off, or at least help my colleagues understand that this is not a slam dunk because it does good things.”

Plessas said the system would be beneficial in many investigations.

Jill Schramm/MDN Minot resident Jedidiah Rader addresses the Minot City Council to oppose a police proposal for vehicle license-reading cameras.

“What we’re looking for is a system that can provide us with safety measures to protect the public, at the same time with robust policy and procedures protecting civil liberties,” he said. “The system focuses on license plates and vehicles and it provides still shots, which analyze those license plates and vehicles, to determine whether that’s a wanted vehicle.”

In addition to helping locate wanted suspects, the system is useful in finding missing or abducted individuals, he said.

“As far as the civil liberties, that is one of my major concerns,” Plessas added. “By developing strict policies and procedures, I feel like we can have the best of both worlds.”

Kristen MacLeod, Community Engagement manager with Flock Safety, explained how the company’s license plate reader can help short-staffed law agencies stretch their forces. The company operates in more than 5,000 communities nationwide and works with 3,000 law enforcement agencies, assisting in solving 10% of reported crime, she said.

She noted the data is owned by the city and will never be shared by Flock with third parties, and all data is automatically deleted after 30 days.

“So, it balances your constituents’ privacy with providing your officers that investigative value of that 30-day historical information,” MacLeod said. “No personal data is kept in the Flock system. It’s simply still images of the rear of vehicles. Data security is also very important to us. All of the images are end-to-end encrypted.”

Images are stored on a secure cloud server. The system provides an audit trail to indicate who used the system and why, she said. Flock also provides an online transparency portal for the public to see how their law enforcement is using the system.

Blessum said the system potentially creates opportunity for crime. He cited the case of a Pennsylvania officer who used it to track his estranged wife and faced charges of terroristic threats and stalking.

“I don’t doubt for a moment that we could write a policy that will absolutely find that when it occurs, but it’s already occurred,” Blessum said.

MacLeod offered that she is familiar with two other instances in Kansas in which the Flock system was misused, and the misuse detected in audits.

“Unfortunately, anytime you have a human and technology in any sort of system, of course, there is risk for misuse, But again, with robust policy in place, you can really mitigate those risks to the best of the ability of the department,” she said.

It also was noted at the meeting that the Flock system can be integrated with the department’s mobile mounted cameras on vehicles, which currently are not using license plate reader technology. Blessum said that raises more concerns because police vehicles often end up in higher crime areas of the city.

“One of the major civil liberties issues with this nationwide is there is a discriminatory part that can come with that, whether you look at it from a racial perspective or just simply an economic status perspective,” Blessum said. “We’re going to be, in my opinion, potentially targeting people based on a factor other than something that’s completely random, simply because of where they live or their economic status.”

“It is indiscriminate in that it is focusing on wanted vehicles and suspect vehicles only, versus every vehicle,” MacLeod responded. She added the system can search even when a license plate number isn’t known, using vehicle attributes, the licensing state or partial numbers.

Council member Lisa Olson said people already are tracked by security cameras that are more invasive than license plate readers.

“I think it’s a wonderful tool,” she said of the readers.

Council member Paul Pitner proposed tabling the contract proposal until a policy for use of the system is drafted and the council and community have a chance to weigh in on it.

The council voted 5-1 to table, with Scott Samuelson dissenting to tabling.

Resident Travis Zablotney spoke later in the meeting to call surveillance cameras a slippery slope.

“It’s just another one of those kinds of things that we don’t want as citizens that we get forced upon us,” he said. “Who are we protecting? The crime happened in these cases. We’re not stopping any crime from happening, but we are taking away the liberties of all the rest of us.”

He added there will be issues within the police department with someone using the tool wrongly if the city approves a contract.

Resident Josiah Roise agreed the camera system will be abused.

“Other systems even less advanced have already been abused,” he said. “Trading freedom for security, you lose both, and you deserve neither one.”

Resident Jedidiah Rader voiced concern that anything using internet technology can be hacked. It is quite different from a closed circuit system used in retail stores that might be monitored by a security guard, he said.

“I would encourage caution with this, and probably not do this,” he said, “because this is not going to help us long term.”