Police: Cameras a crimefighter; but critics worry
Police have used cruiser-mounted cameras for years to help identify passing motorists whose license plates show up in crime databases — a way to snare wanted felons, fleeing criminals or stolen vehicles.
More recently, a new sort of camera does basically the same thing, but it’s mounted at the entry ways to communities, acting as a kind of quiet sentry. And it isn’t always used by police.
A leading vendor of the equipment is Atlanta-based Flock Safety, with equipment now used in about 1,400 cites in more than 40 U.S. states. Flock says it has 16 contracts in Greater Columbus, six of them with law enforcement.
One of the latest is Genoa Township in Delaware County. The township said it will install three cameras at its southern entrances this month.
From every passing vehicle, the cameras will capture state license plate numbers; vehicle descriptions, including make and model; and details about bumper stickers or decals and whether it has a roof rack. The data, combined with artificial intelligence programming, then can be used to investigate crime.
“If officers learn from a doorbell image or witness that a crime was committed between 2 and 4 a.m. by someone driving a white Honda, they can search the database to see which white Hondas entered the township around those hours,” a township news release says.
The cameras also are connected to national crime databases and will alert officers within seconds of wanted felons, missing people or sex offenders passing through an entry point.
Privacy advocates and critics of ever-increasing uses of surveillance cameras, however, worry that “mission creep” will expand their use by law enforcement — and possible misuse.
From red-light and traffic cameras to license plate readers and drones, “there’s been a continual increase in the availability and effectiveness of this technology,” said Gary Daniels, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, based in Columbus. “We are gradually getting to the point of big cities going to 24/7 surveillance.”
Holly Beilin, a Flock spokeswoman, acknowledged the concerns and pointed to features the company has installed that it calls “ethical guardrails.”
Some of those features include: data is automatically purged after one month, and users are required to give a brief reason for using the data each time they access it.
For police, that means entering an incident report number for crimes such as burglary or hit-and-run in order to justify data access.
Law enforcement agencies already using the technology say it has helped solve and prevent crime.
In Upper Arlington, which has 11 of the cameras, patrol officers received an alert in September for a woman wanted for murder in West Virginia. She had been passing through the city with her boyfriend when her license plate triggered a citywide alert, police Lt. Jason Messer said.
“We stopped the car and detained them,” he said. “We were able to identify her vehicle within a minute.”
Messer said he’s pleased with the results — about 20 felony arrests since April 2021 — mostly for property crimes.
“We are unlikely to have identified these potentially dangerous people without the aid of this force-multiplying technology,” Messer said.
Reynoldsburg and Ohio State University police also have the cameras.
Flock would not name any of its customers, including private-sector users, which in other places have included neighborhood groups or homeowner associations.
Flock charges $2,500 annually to lease each camera. Upper Arlington spent $27,500 last year.
The village of Minerva Park, which has about 2,100 residents and is located east of Cleveland Avenue on Columbus’ North Side, had concerns about fights breaking out on basketball courts used by nonresidents, according to Police Chief Matt Delp.
So in early 2021, officials there installed two of the cameras at the village’s main entrances. In one case, it led to an arrest after red paint was left on a vehicle after a hit-skip accident.
“The powerful thing about this system is that you can search for just red vehicles,” Delp said.
The Flock data linked a car to the incident, and police charged the suspect with leaving the scene of an accident.
Delp cautioned that solid police work is still needed to verify facts and establish probable cause.
Unlike the rollout in Genoa Township, including a story about the cameras in the community newsletter, some communities are more secretive.
Upper Arlington, for example, doesn’t want to say where its cameras are located or what they look like. Messer said he doesn’t think many residents are aware of them.
Emma Speight, Upper Arlington’s community affairs director, said there was no community outreach, explaining, “The team leading the effort did not see a need to do so.”
When Flock installed 29 cameras in Dayton a few years ago — part of a free trial for police — residents there expressed concern that many were erected in the city’s Latino community. The outcry then expanded to other Dayton police surveillance tools, including use of the ShotSpotter gunfire detection system. (Columbus has installed ShotSpotter in four, three-mile zones within the city in areas with surging homicide and gun violence cases.)
Last year, Dayton city leaders responded to citizen complaints there by passing an ordinance that requires a full vetting and analysis of surveillance systems before they’re deployed, said Ellis Jacobs, an attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE), a nonprofit law firm that serves underserved communities in 32 northwestern and western Ohio counties.
The Flock cameras eventually were removed, but they are again being reviewed by Dayton officials for use under the new law, Jacobs said.
“They seem to be responsible for solving very few crimes,” compared to the enormous amount of data collected, he said.
Relying on technology over community policing and relationship-building “is the kind of over-policing that these communities don’t want,” Jacobs said.
In Genoa Township, Police Chief Steve Gammill cited “proactive” policing as the reason for using the Flock cameras, which were approved by a 2-1 vote by township trustees.
Trustee Renee Vaughan, the lone no vote, said she sought input from hundreds of her constituents, most of whom responded that they “weren’t in favor,” she said.
“At first glance, you’d think this is great,” Vaughan said. “But then I asked the police, ‘Is it a necessity? Are you going to solve more crime?’ They said that they didn’t think so, but they’d solve it faster.
“I didn’t think they were purchased to alleviate a crime issue, because we don’t have a crime issue.”
Daniels said the ACLU will continue to monitor Flock and other new technology and how it might infringe on the rights of unsuspecting citizens.
“You can now really quite easily track someone over time: going to the grocery store, going to the mosque, going to the gay bar ... “he said.
Daniels also is pushing for a statewide law, not just a police policy, to inform residents about cost, purpose and use of surveillance system advances, similar to the one in Dayton.
“It should not be the burden for Americans to justify why the government should be surveilling them,” Daniels said.