Oak Park leaders voted Aug. 5 to shut off the village’s license plate reading cameras.
The Oak Park board of trustees voted to cancel the village’s contract with Flock Safety, shutting off the eight license plate reading cameras the company operates in the village. The board opted to cancel the contract outright rather than adopt a measure that would’ve shut the cameras off for 90 days. The decision comes weeks after the state announced it was investigating the company that runs them.
The village’s network of cameras was no longer capturing images as of 6:43 p.m. Wednesday, August 6. Oak Park police and the village’s law departments will continue working with Flock to coordinate the physical removal the cameras in the near future, according to the village.
The village renewed its contract with Flock Safety last year via a narrow 4-3 board vote. The Flock Automated License Plate readers “capture an image of a vehicle’s license plate, read the image using software, compare the plate number read against databases containing vehicles of interest, and, ultimately, alert an officer when the system has captured the license plate of a vehicle of interest,” according to the village.
The technology also allows law enforcement to search a nationwide database for surveillance data on vehicles of interest. Flock has contracts with more than 4,000 communities nationwide, according to the company.
Four trustees — Jenna Leving Jacobson, Brian Straw, Derek Eder and Chibuike Enyia — made up the majority voting to cancel the contract. Those trustees cited concerns over privacy, distrust of the Flock corporation and the potential for the cameras to be used for immigration enforcement in violation of both state law and village sanctuary ordinances.
“This is what democracy looks like,” Straw said. “So I do hope other communities will look at this conversation and will look at the national stories that are coming out and reconsider if they want to continue participating with Flock and continue sharing their data. This is a healthy part of democracy, to actually change what we’re doing in response to national events and trends.”
While trustees said they trust that the Oak Park police have been doing their best to mitigate those risks, the issues were too urgent to delay the vote, the trustees said.
“We could stop using them for 90 days, but that doesn’t mean that Flock, which is the problem factor here not the Oak Park police department’s use of them, can’t continue to use that data to build their databases, to train their AI,” Leving Jacobson said. “We can’t protect the data that’s being collected in our community from being used to harm innocent people, and we’re challenged to protect those people.”
In June, the Illinois Secretary of State’s office said it was investigating Flock Safety over alleged illegal searches by out-of-state law enforcement of data produced from Illinois license plate readers. The searches under scrutiny by the office include an alleged inquiry by Texas law enforcement through the Mount Prospect police department’s database into the whereabouts of a Texas woman investigators believed had an abortion, as well as searches connected to immigration enforcement cases.
Trustees Jim Taglia and Cory Wesley offered an alternative motion that would’ve turned the cameras off for 90 days, giving the board more time to make a call on the contract. Going with that option would’ve potentially opened up an opportunity for more feedback from the Oak Park police and the community, they said.
“You can’t hold the police accountable to unrealistic expectations,” Taglia said. “The real question is about what Oak Park is willing to do to maintain a safe, inclusive and economically vital community. What is the role of technology in policing? The answer requires hard work and can’t be done without the police being effective, yet still consistent with community values. And it doesn’t get done by removing Flock cameras here tonight.”
Wesley said that he and Taglia knew which direction the majority of the board would go before they introduced their motion, but it was important to advocate for a process they believed was right.
“I knew what the votes are tonight, but I worked on this with Jim anyway,” Wesley said. “The potential for harm is real, cameras in Illinois were accessed for purposes that run counter to our values and in ways I didn’t anticipate last year under the Biden administration. So, if we’re this close to agreement, why the separate motion? Because I want to see a different process to get to this point, if we’re going to get here. A process that pulls in our professional police force to give them a seat at the table and input into the future of the tools that will be available to them to do their job.”
Village President Vicki Scaman, who in the end voted in favor of both motions after it was clear that the contract would be canceled, said the board failed its obligation to the village’s professional staff.
“While I know that all of you are very genuine about your service to our community, but this feels icky,” she said. “Nobody is going to watch this meeting and learn anything. We had the power as the village of Oak Park to have a more substantive conversation where we’re with our professional staff to uncover the challenges and to get down to facts and likely have come to the same place.”
Police Chief Shatonya Johnson was present at the meeting and gave succinct answers to a few questions, but she did not give a presentation on the cameras Tuesday night. In June, Johnson provided trustees with a detailed memo about the license plate reader program.
That memo included information on steps the Oak Park police department had taken to limit the access other agencies had to local data. Out-of-state agencies had to obtain permission from Chief Johnson to search Oak Park’s Flock data as of June, according to the memo.
The memo also reported that the early stages of an audit of the license plate reader program confirmed that Oak Park data had been tapped on at least one occasion for immigration enforcement. Early work on the program audit found that last January south suburban Palos Heights Police had conducted 28 statewide Flock searches that included Oak Park data and had listed the reason for the searches as an investigation into “immigrations violation,” according to the memo.
Oak Park police had already been using the cameras with many key restrictions, and their use has been reviewed by the village’s Civilian Police Oversite Committee. Oak Park searches of their data was restricted to investigations related to a few violent crimes.
Secretary of State Alex Giannoulias told reporters last month the state believed that 46 different law enforcement agencies from around the country had made illegal searches of Illinois Flock Safety datasets.
Garrett Langley, Flock’s CEO, wrote a blog post saying the company had taken steps to make sure all law enforcement searches of Illinois license plate reader data comply with state law and that it had banned 47 agencies from accessing Illinois camera data after an internal audit. Flock Safety also maintains that the search into the Texas woman didn’t violate state law because it was a missing person investigation where no criminal charges were being sought.
The company’s cameras are also the subject of a federal lawsuit filed in Virginia, in which a civil liberties organization is arguing that the company’s surveillance violates the constitution.
