St. Cloud Police Detail Flock Camera Costs And Audit Before Council Review

(KNSI) – St. Cloud Police Chief Jeff Oxton has put the department’s license plate reader program on paper ahead of this month’s city council review, telling the mayor and city administrator what the cameras cost, where they sit and how many plates they scan.

The two memos, dated August 6th and August 13th, came with an independent audit of the program which the city recently released.

Oxton wrote that recent coverage of the technology “has stemmed from inaccurate information or misrepresentation of what the actual technology entails.” His memo says the cameras read plates and log vehicle descriptions, and do not do facial recognition, record audio, capture images of drivers or passengers, or enforce speed limits.

The city has 10 fixed cameras, twice the number in service a year ago. Five Flock cameras have run since March of 2024, four at 9th Avenue South and University Drive and one downtown at 5th Avenue and 1st Street South. Five newer Axon cameras went up on major St. Cloud bridges in June. Marked squads have carried in-car readers since July of 2024, about 39 of them. The crowdsourced site DeFlock lists 18 readers in St. Cloud.

Flock costs $15,000 a year for its five cameras, storage and service, on a year-to-year contract. The Axon bridge cameras were folded into the department’s five-year Axon contract, which runs $580,822.84 a year and also covers Tasers, body cameras, squad cameras, evidence storage and prosecutor software. Oxton wrote they were added after that price was already set. It all comes out of the police budget, including replacing cameras that are vandalized, which the warranty does not cover. The department says it will seek restitution from anyone charged with damaging one.

The audit shows how much the readers take in. Over 60 days, in-car cameras logged 1,053,902 plate reads, 7,603 of them possible matches to a list of stolen vehicles, warrants, suspended or revoked licenses and missing persons. The fixed cameras logged 94,035 reads over 30 days, with 5,304 possible matches. Officers have to confirm a match through a live database and establish their own grounds before pulling anyone over.

Rampart Audit LLC found the program complies with state law in its April 29th report, the first of the biennial reviews Minnesota now requires. The auditor also found the department had no internal audit requirement of its own and recommended at least two supervisors periodically review who is searching what, check any plate searched more than once, and match searches against the case numbers officers give as their reason.

Flock deletes its data after 30 days and Axon after 60, and the auditor found nothing held longer. The department has switched off Flock’s data-sharing feature, and Rampart was told St. Cloud had not received a single request for its data from another agency or the public.

Since the start of 2025, the memos say, the readers have led to about 50 drivers cited for license violations, recovered stolen vehicles, suspect vehicles in hit-and-run crashes and a vehicle tied to a homicide.

The work session is set for 4:30 p.m. September 21st at St. Cloud City Hall. It is open to the public but is not a public hearing, so there will be no comment period.

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