Correction: In a previous version of the story, it was reported that a Flock Safety ALPR was utilized in the wrongful arrest of Jaselyn Horne. This is incorrect. “There is no way to ‘enter’ a name into Flock Safety LPRs, officers can only query by vehicle characteristics such as license plate information, make, model, and color, for example. No information about the driver of a given vehicle is stored in the system,” a Flock Safety spokesperson said. As an additional clarification, the other wrongful arrest case did also did not involve Flock ALPRs. The article has been updated.

Almost all of incorporated South King County is using automatic license plate reader cameras — and Enumclaw Police Chief Tim Floyd wants to bring them here.

However, an Enumclaw City Council committee recently decided to not move the EPD’s proposal to the full council, citing issues like the invasion of privacy and the lack of government oversight of a private company. That does not mean a proposal can’t make it to the full council at some point, and Floyd said he is determined to continue the conversation.

“This is not the future of policing,” he said. “This is the ‘right now’ of policing, and we’re behind.”

For those who don’t know, automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras do exactly what it says on the tin: automatically take pictures of license plates when cars drive by.

This isn’t new technology, Floyd said in a recent interview; it’s the same that’s been used on toll bridges, HOV lanes, and even police cars for decades.

What’s new —or, at least relatively — he continued, is Flock Safety, an ALPR distributor and custodian of a centralized databank for law enforcement that allows officers to respond more quickly to crimes and other incidents where a car is involved, like spotting stolen vehicles and getaway cars to tracking Amber and Silver alerts.

“It’s like having… extra sets of cop eyes on duty 24/7, 365,” Floyd said, and not just in Enumclaw, but across King, Pierce, and Yakima County, and even other states, connecting all these law enforcement agencies to each other through Flock.

The eight ALPRs Floyd has proposed are stationary and would be placed on State Routes 165, 169, and 410 to track traffic coming onto and out of the city. The total cost, he said, would be about $24,000 a year ($30,000 the first year, with installation costs), with the possibility of covering some of that cost with grant money or other non-general budget sources.

According to Flock Safety, these cameras only take pictures of license plates — no faces or the insides of a car. Additionally, these cameras do not track speed or record any other traffic violations.

All photos are stored in Flock’s database for 30 days unless a car is tagged as suspect by law enforcement. After 30 days, untagged photos are deleted from the system.

After a crime is committed with a car and witnesses have a description of the vehicle (or better yet, license plate information), law enforcement can put that information into the Flock database. If that car is spotted by a camera, one or more agencies may get pinged with that vehicle’s location, regardless of where it may be spotted.

Floyd gave an example of how well the ALPRs helped law enforcement with the armed Haggen robbery in Auburn last week.

According to the Auburn Reporter, the suspects — three juvenile males and one adult female — left the scene in a blue Audi A4, which was identified by “using traffic cameras.”

Those were Flock Safety ALPRs, Floyd said, which tracked which direction the Audi was heading and allowed officers to locate the vehicle on Lakeland Hills Way Southeast to stop the car and arrest the suspects. Officers also confiscated three handguns with extended magazines and devices to converted the firearms to be fully automatic.

Conversely, Floyd said there was a recent burglary at a local liquor store and the suspect escaped with $5,000; he added that if Enumclaw had ALPRs, it would have been far more likely the suspect would have been arrested.

“There’s a net of Flock all the way around Enumclaw. We’re a hole in that net,” Floyd said, adding that he fears crime in Enumclaw could increase as criminals are driven out of areas that use Flock cameras (Everett started using them in the summer of 2024 and saw a 76% decrease in car thefts that year, according to the chief). “If the criminals are leaving where the Flock cameras are, they’re going to go to where they aren’t.”

Buckley is the only other city in the area that does not currently utilize Flock Safety ALPRs; according to City Administrator Courtney Brunell, the city council hasn’t discussed utilizing this technology.

BLACK DIAMOND STATS

The city of Black Diamond started using five Flock Safety ALPRs in the summer of 2023.

Within two months, the Black Diamond Police Department tracked 28 stolen vehicles, helped officers recover four stolen vehicles, and assisted an outside agency with a homicide investigation, prompting Chief Jamey Kiblinger to call the program a “huge success.”

The Black Diamond ALPRs totaled 214 “hits” throughout 2024.

Some notable cases from that year include:

• After getting a hit on a stolen truck, officers attempted to contact the driver. After he fled in the car, officers used a spike strip to stop the vehicle, but were initially unsuccessful. However, the truck lost a wheel and, with King County Guardian One helicopter assistance, the vehicle was tracked into Renton, where the suspect stole another car. The suspect was eventually taken into custody in Seattle.

• A hit on a car involved in a burglary of a “high value piece of sports memorabilia.” According to the BDPD, the driver of the vehicle was not the owner, but the owner was able to direct police to his friend, who was driving the car at the time. Police were able to recover the items from where the suspect (a former friend of the victim) lived.

• A hit on a stolen car that, in fact, was not stolen, but — unknown to the car’s owner — was affixed with a stolen license plate from another car of a similar model and color. The stolen plate was recovered.

PRIVACY CONCERNS, WRONGFUL ARRESTS

While Floyd argues how beneficial these ALPRs can be in keeping not just Enumclaw residents safe, but also officers by knowing when potentially dangerous suspects enter the city, Council members Chris Gruner and Bobby Martinez argue the risks of privacy violations, lack of government oversight, and the infringement of personal freedom are too great to move forward with using the cameras.

Gruner and Martinez are two of the three members of the city council’s Public Safety Committee, and who voted down the proposal to take the ALPR discussion to the full council during an April 14 meeting. The third, Council member Jan Martinell, voted in favor.

“Enforcing our laws must be balanced with limiting principles to prevent overreach and encroachment into personal freedoms. The Flock Safety cameras collect data on every car that drives into their field of view – even those not associated with a crime – and sends the data off to a private company over which we have no operational oversight,” Gruner said in an emailed statement. “I’m not interested in expanding this surveillance dragnet into Enumclaw.”

“While marketed as a tool for stolen cars or public safety, these systems represent a major step toward normalized, privatized mass surveillance. I support community-based policing and public safety, but not at the cost of handing over detailed vehicle tracking data to a private company participating in a rapidly expanding national surveillance network,” Martinez said. “… What begins as a local crime tool can quickly become a federal surveillance asset. I’m not anti-technology or anti-law enforcement. I’m pro-accountability, pro-privacy, and pro-liberty. Enumclaw residents never asked for this, and we should reject it completely before surveillance becomes normalized in a town that prides itself on independence.”

Floyd doesn’t consider Flock ALPRs as mass surveillance and countered that there are multiple safeguards in place so that citizens’ privacy and data are protected.

This includes the 30 day information retention limit, but also that law enforcement using Flock’s database can’t just search any random license plate — they have to have a case number in order to be able to access any data from the system. Additionally, Floyd said, all the searches are auditable.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to game the system; a former Kansas police chief was found in August 2024 to have used the Flock ALPRs 228 times to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend over four months, according to the Wichita Eagle; he was able to do so by listing the reason for the searches as investigating a missing child, drug use, and other suspicious activity.

“We revoked their access immediately and took away their cameras following that incident,” Flock Safety Public Relations Manager Connor Metz said in an interview.

Sedgwick Police Chief Lee Nygaard resigned in October 2023 when an investigation into unrelated misconduct began; his police chief certification was ultimately pulled, though he faced no criminal charges, according to reports.

Another Kansas police officer, Kechi Police Lieutenant Victor Heiar, was arrested in October 2022 to monitor his estranged wife. He was removed from the department and pled guilty to computer crime and stalking, both misdemeanors.

Wrongful arrests are another concern. According to The News & Observer in North Carolina, Jacqueline McNeill’s license plate was tagged by an ALPR camera as a possible suspect in a shooting, although the only reason her plates were flagged was because the suspect’s car was a white sedan and her white car was nearby. The city settled a civil case for $60,000.

The News & Observer also reported on how Jasmine Horne’s name was mis-entered into an ALPR system instead of Jaselyn Horne, who was later arrested and charged with attempted first degree murder a few days later. Although Jasmine was only in custody for about 15 minutes, a civil case was settled for $10,000.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shares the same concerns as Gruner and Martinez, and recommends contracts with Flock or other ALPR distributors contain language that limits the amount of time license plate and car information is stored (down from 30 days to 72 hours, or even three minutes), limits how data is shared (from requiring written permission from one agency to another, or not at all), and limits the ability for other agencies to use Flock’s database in conjunction with other crime databases.

Floyd is in support of longer information retention times.

”The shorter the retention period, the shorter period we have in which to develop a lead on a case. Often when we respond to a robbery, burglary, etc. that has local surveillance video from a store or something, we won’t actually get that video to view until a few days later until a manager comes on site to make a recording for us,” he said. “If that video has a vehicle description or a license plate on it, but the retention period on Flock is so short that the information has purged already, it is not as useful to us.”

He also supports sharing gathered data with other agencies in at least neighboring states, pointing to how Flock ALPRs aided law enforcement tracking a Yelm homicide suspect to Montana.