Commissioner Pruitt said the people need to decide
Henderson Police Department Chief Billy Bolin on Tuesday told city commissioners that Flock technology has been the best tool for police departments since DNA testing.
Bolin was at the meeting after asking to give a presentation to the Board of Commissioners on the technology that is currently drawing criticism across the country, some of it linked to police officers who misuse the technology to track individuals. Bolin said he wanted to give the commission a clearer picture of how HPD uses Flock cameras.
Commissioner Robert Pruitt was the most outspoken of commissioners present, saying that HPD should be careful with Flock and violating residents’ civil liberties.
“I don’t know if that’s what we need,” Pruitt said, and added that he wanted to ensure that citizens get a chance to voice their opinion and make sure it’s what they want.
Bolin said HPD leases from the Flock company 22 cameras in town at 11 locations—a camera facing a direction on one side of the street and another camera facing the other direction on the other side. (He did say that Lowe’s has Flock cameras in its parking lot which are not part of the HPD system.)
In Bolin’s presentation, the chief said that the type of Flock cameras that HPD use are Falcon cameras, which only take still images of the back of vehicles when they pass one of the 11 locations. He said the cameras that HPD use do not record video, facial recognition or speed detection.
The chief said an image of the back of a vehicle also comes with the date, time and license plate number as well as the camera’s number and its location.
Additionally, Bolin said HPD officers and investigators as well as 911 Dispatch have access to Flock information, and HPD shares information with 3,567 agencies nationwide of which 1,304 are in Kentucky.
He added that HPD does not share any Flock information with federal agencies. Bolin said he doesn’t want HPD to get caught up in the nationwide drama as his reason for not sharing with federal agencies.
Additionally, Bolin in his presentation said that implementing Flock cameras received the most votes of the projects coming out of the 2023 Inner City Improvement Plan. He added that HPD has used Flock 806 times in the past month.
Regarding accountability, Bolin said protections are in place so that officers don’t misuse the technology. For one, officers need to input a case number to perform a search.
Another check that the system has involves abnormal search detection, which would flag multiple queries of the same license plate. The program also checks a high rate of queries, the bypassing of mandatory case codes and time-based anomalies, such as when an officer who normally works in the day makes a query at 2 a.m., Bolin said. He said audits are run monthly.
Bolin said that there are 750,000 sworn police officers in the United States and 70 cases total throughout the country in which officers have misused Flock. Some of those cases have made national news, including recent cases when officers used the system to watch ex-girlfriends.
Because those came to light, Bolin said it shows that police departments are working to be accountable and dealing with misuses.
Bolin said he was stopped by an officer stopped him before the meeting and was told by him that it’s almost like commenters are questioning officers’ integrity. Bolin told the commissioners that HPD officers would not tolerate a fellow officer misusing the system—“They’re not going to tolerate it”—and officers would be the first to report a fellow officer abusing the Flock system.
Pruitt mentioned a case somewhere in the country in which the Flock system made a mistake recognizing an “O” from a “0” (the letter “O” from the number “0.”) That led to officers drawing guns on the wrong car, he said.
Bolin responded that Flock is for lead information, like other tools police use, and once arrived on a scene, a police officer would determine a threat from there.
Pruitt also mentioned other cities in Kentucky that have removed or will remove Flock cameras.
“This is a great tool,” Bolin said. “I would hate to lose the tool.”
In another response to Pruitt’s questioning of its impact on civil liberties, Bolin said individuals are being tracked “everywhere we go” and more intensely than what HPD’s Flock cameras do. Lots of stores, including in Henderson, use facial recognition when a customer enters the building, he said.
At the end of the presentation, Mayor Brad Staton asked that Bolin pay close attention to what occurs nationally regarding Flock cameras and also be prepared to change policy at HPD when needed so that any abuses that have occurred at other places do not happen here.
During commissioner comments, Staton and recently appointed Commissioner Austin Vowels said they want to continue to monitor how Flock cameras are used. Pruitt, after commending the police department, said, “We have to give the people the right to say, ‘Hey, do we want this in our city?’”
Though commissioners wanted him to look for more protections during the meeting, Bolin told the Hendersonian after that he was comfortable with the guardrails currently in place that would prevent abuse. He said he didn’t know of any other measures to put in place.
Bolin said he’s not received any phone calls from residents complaining about Flock cameras. He’s seen a lot of negative comments on various social media posts, he said.
Included in a handout Bolin provided is a list of 20 instances that Flock has helped HPD with various cases. On the handout, Bolin noted it was not a complete list, but a sampling of important cases from a few officers’ memories. The cases range from finding missing people from both here and afar (such as Iowa) to shootings, robberies, rape, murder and fraud.
