Wenatchee PD's Flock cameras coming back online
The Wenatchee Police Department began reactivating its eight automatic license plate reading cameras Thursday after the department shut down them down late last year following a court ruling that ruled the data collected by these cameras was public record.
These cameras automatically read all vehicle license plates around the city of Wenatchee and are used by law enforcement to assist in criminal investigations. After eight months offline, Wenatchee police are resuming their use only after the state legislature passed new laws to regulate and restrict their use.
In Wenatchee, these eight cameras are located around town on major roads to capture people driving into and out of town as well as throughout.
The American Civic Liberties Union has shared various concerns over law enforcement's use of the technology, including Flock Safety's standard 30-day storage policy, as it creates a "comprehensive record" of people's comings and goings without a suspicion that they've committed any wrongdoing.
The new state law limits storage of data collected by the plate readers to 21 days unless part of an ongoing case.
Chief Edgar Reinfeld said the cameras were used to find Travis Decker's vehicle and identify that he had left the Wenatchee area and not returned because of the Flock cameras.
Wenatchee police and other local agencies contract with Atlanta-based company, Flock Safety. Flock Safety supplies law enforcement with a mix of products, including video cameras and a host of automatic license plate reading cameras.
Like many jurisdictions around the state, following the court ruling in Skagit County Superior Court, the Wenatchee Police Department shut down its eight cameras given how difficult and expensive it would be to comply with public record requirements.
The state legislature passed a law regulating these cameras more strictly in the last legislative session. The new law also exempts the data collected by the cameras from public records requests.
After the law went into effect, Reinfeld said the police department took some time to familiarize itself with the new requirements and believes they've ironed out the legal and other issues with system.
The new law, for example, allows the cameras to be used for comparing data on databases for stolen vehicles, missing persons, persons on the center for missing and exploited children, vehicles registered to persons with felony or gross misdemeanor warrants or investigations involving a felony or gross misdemeanor.
Parking enforcement and traffic information for public studies are also allowed.
"We got ourselves into where we think we're in good shape with (the law)," he said.
Douglas County Sheriff Tyler Caille said that their cameras have been live since late January, taking a lot less time to come back online. Caille also said that sheriff's office is planning to add another 11 cameras to their network, for a total of 17 cameras.
East Wenatchee Police Department Chief Rick Johnson said in an email that their cameras came back online in April after a public announcement at a city council meeting.
And as local and state agencies continue to leverage this technology, concerns over the public's civil liberties will persist. But for Reinfeld, he said his department felt their absence in several real cases since the cameras were shut down about seven months ago. His hope is that these cameras will help prevent repeat crimes from happening.
"The real hope is to cut our cycle time on identifying suspects to limit the amount of damage that criminal activity can continue to do, limit future victims just by cutting down the amount of time that we spend trying to identify suspect vehicles," Reinfeld said. "Crimes sometimes are one and done. A lot of criminal activity is not. People are re-victimized ... in the time that we spend trying to identify, locate, and then contact, detain, and arrest suspects, and so this is the most important part of this tool. It shaves that time down, sometimes to minutes."
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