The Blue Island City Council approved a contract reauthorizing eight of the city’s 14 license plate cameras last week, months after two other suburbs moved to deactivate the cameras.
City administrator Thomas Wogan said Thursday that a majority of the council agreed with the mayor, Police Department and city administration that the Flock Safety system continues to be a valuable tool in preventing, investigating and solving crimes within the community.
But Ald. Joshua Roll said he is concerned that gathering and sharing data that can track residents’ whereabouts could be a risk to privacy, echoing the concerns of other suburban officials in Oak Park and Evanston. Those suburbs deactivated the cameras following a state audit that found Flock was sharing Illinois data with federal agencies.
Roll said his experience working with private health care and finance data analytics informs his concern, as he said the technology is advancing faster than regulatory policy can keep up with.
For example, he said, the technology can organize information such as the type of car, the license plate, the vehicle’s direction and speed and the time of day from camera footage into a data spreadsheet.
This data spreadsheet, he said, can easily be used to make predictions about where and when people will be, making them easier to target.
While Flock representatives have assured officials the company does not allow data to be used in this way, Roll said he wanted to ensure local officials understand the technology and have an oversight mechanism on data usage before reapproving the cameras.
“This is data that a machine-learning algorithm can create by looking at those photos,” Roll said. “In the past, somebody would have to sit down and watch all the footage, and that was kind of our limit against surveillance.”
So, Roll said, it was concerning when he found over the summer that reports on how local law enforcement use this data were incomplete. He said officials at a recent City Council meeting could not answer his questions about who can access the data and why people are accessing the data.
“We moved ahead with bad advice, without knowing these key things about how it works and what the dangers are,” Roll said.
But Wogan said the Blue Island Police Department maintains strict policies governing the use of this technology.
“Flock Safety cameras in Blue Island are not used for any out-of-state searches, and data access remains limited to legitimate law enforcement purposes consistent with Illinois law,” Wogan said.
Roll said he specifically takes issue with local law enforcement’s incomplete documentation on how they use the data.
He said when reviewing police usage of the data he found thousands of examples where officers were not tagging a case number when searching the camera data, making it hard to prove if the officers had reasonable cause when collecting information about residents.
He said law enforcement officers need reasonable cause to search the data, meaning their search must be tied to a registered case that describes why they’re looking up the information. But if an officer does not tag a registered case to a search, it’s hard to know if the officer is using the data for registered police work or for other reasons.
While he trusts the local police department, he said it’s a liability for the city to not know how data is being used.
“It takes a bad actor, and we have a serious privacy issue,” Roll said. “We’re just taking the admin’s word for it.”
Moreover, outside of data usage, Roll said he is also concerned with the ability to share the data, especially after Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced in August that an audit conducted by his office found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection was able to utilize Flock Safety data to monitor drivers in Illinois.
At the time, Evanston officials said it was “deeply troubling” to discover that Flock Safety had shared information about vehicles in Evanston with federal immigration agencies. The city deactivated its 19 license plate reading cameras shortly afterwards in August. Oak Park also terminated its contract with Flock on Aug. 5.
Blue Island police Chief Jason Slattery said in September that the city updated its policy on Flock cameras so officials can only use the camera data if they sign a form saying they will abide by Illinois policy that bars sharing footage with federal or out-of-state agencies, among other terms. If this form is violated, then the organization’s access is removed.
Slattery also said police recently removed access from entities outside Illinois, and said data is now only shared with Illinois municipalities.
But Roll said while it makes sense for interconnected municipalities around Chicago to work together and share data, it becomes hard to regulate data sharing when so many people have access to the data.
“It takes just one ICE sympathizer in a local police department who’s willing to just use their own access, write this data down and share it,” Roll said. “Even if our department is watching their logins, tagging their cases, they have to make sure that whoever we share the data is doing the same thing.”
When the city entered a contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures the automated cameras, to install eight cameras in 2021, Roll said he worked with city officials to create data privacy policies, modeled after the policies in Champaign.
The policy gave the city an “out,” or the ability to terminate the contract, he said, if officials felt like they couldn’t trust the company.
The policy also required the city to note if there have been any major updates to the Flock terms of service once a year and produce an annual report showing how the cameras are used, how the data is accessed and the efficacy of the technology, such as how many crimes are being solved using the data.
The company also assured the city it would not keep data for more than 30 days.
Six Flock cameras were added in the city later, for a total of 14 cameras in the area, Chief Slattery said at a September council meeting.
