OSHKOSH, Wis. (WBAY) - The Oshkosh City Council voted unanimously to rescind its contract renewal with Flock Safety less than 24 hours after approving the use of Flock cameras for another year despite pushback from the public.
The morning after a 5-2 vote renewing a contract with Flock for another year, Oshkosh Police Chief Dean Smith said members of his agency brought him security information about the product that conflicted with what Flock Safety representatives shared with the council Tuesday night. He took action to express his loss of support for the contract.
“I know that you trust me to give you my best recommendations, that are in the best interest of the city, with the information I have available to me, I will not betray that trust,” Smith said.
False statements about heat maps
Smith said he witnessed how one statement to the council proved to be false.
On Tuesday night, Flock Safety’s experts told the council their license-plate reading systems did not create heat maps to track vehicles, which Oshkosh police determined to be untrue.
Council members who voted for renewal one night before offered apologies Wednesday.
“I mentioned yesterday how it’s not just jellybeans on each side of a balance that helps me make my decision, and clearly I didn’t have enough jellybeans on the right side,” said Karl Buelow, deputy mayor of Oshkosh.
“I don’t know how I can make a decision or discern what’s right and what’s wrong, or even the capabilities of the system if you lie to me,” said Joe Stephenson, Oshkosh City Council member.
Flock Safety released a statement before the vote on Wednesday night, saying: "It’s disappointing to hear that one small misconception stated during a two-hour meeting, after many other meetings with Oshkosh’s leaders and Police command staff, has resulted in this outcome. Today, we have contacted city and PD leaders and offered to clear up any confusion directly, but have not been afforded the opportunity. It’s troubling that such a minor nuance will cause the removal of a system that has been highly successful in improving public safety in Oshkosh and, just this week, played a key role in the capture of the Most Wanted murder suspect in Wisconsin.
To be explicitly clear about the misunderstanding in question, our representative was asked if the Flock system can “create a pattern or heat map of an individual’s movement.” Our representative understood the question as asking if people can be tracked using the Flock system, to which the answer is categorically “no”. The Flock LPR system captures still images of the exterior of a vehicle, at fixed points in time, with a short data retention period by design (30 days). It does not create a pattern of life, as ruled by dozens of courts around the country; it cannot identify drivers and does not contain any information about the people in the vehicle. There is a map view within the Flock system called a “heat map”, but it only shows where point-in-time images have been captured of a vehicle over that defined short period of time (30 days). This is very different from the pattern of life situation the Council member is inquiring about."
Community response
The decision served as relief for the dozens of community members who told the council the initial vote felt rushed and un-vetted.
“I walked away from it, and I said to my wife on the drive home ‘if this is the best you can get from civic engagement, then what’s the point?’” said Anthony Wallace of Oshkosh.
“We don’t always know everything we’re looking at, and it’s not a weakness to rely on other’s expertise,” said Megan Hart of Oshkosh.
Impact on police operations
Smith said this is now the right path to take but it will be a more challenging one for the police department in terms of solving crime.
“We’re going to end up probably not as successful at apprehending folks just because we don’t have the information we had in the past, as it relates to what we had with the ALPR technology, so it will take more time,” Smith said.
Smith expects all Flock cameras to be taken down across the city before the beginning of summer.
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