St. Cloud City Council To Review Police Use Of Flock Cameras September 21st

(KNSI) – The St. Cloud City Council will get a briefing from the police department on the city’s use of automated license plate readers, including Flock cameras, at a work session on September 21st.

Mayor Jake Anderson told KNSI News he wants the department’s practices on the record before the council takes up the issue. “So much of what goes on with any of these topics, whether it’s automatic license plate readers, data centers, etc., seems to be done in this vacuum of lacking information. And so then folks fill in what they hear other places anecdotally or what they read other jurisdictions doing or not doing.”

The presentation will cover how many readers the city has, what they are used for, and how the data is handled, including retention, ownership, access and audits.

Asked where he stands on the technology, Anderson said he is not going into the session with a position. “The way I view it, I’m pretty neutral on the use of the cameras. I see them as a powerful tool.”

He pointed to stolen vehicles and kidnappings as cases where the cameras can help, while acknowledging the objections that have followed the technology in other cities. “We do have, obviously, our personal liberties and freedoms. So we don’t want to be infringing upon those. But how do we balance that with attempting to provide the public safety folks come to expect?”

Anderson says the city will release what it spends on the cameras and where they are located. The crowdsourced website DeFlock, which relies on user-submitted reports, lists 18 license plate readers in St. Cloud.

The mayor says council members will be able to ask questions of police staff, and that he has no predetermined outcome in mind for the session.

Last month, Sherburne County joined the growing list of Minnesota jurisdictions walking away from the technology. The sheriff’s office shut off its Flock cameras, citing concerns about public trust. The county had run 10 cameras on a grant-funded trial basis and would have needed local tax dollars to keep the program going. Duluth is the largest community in the state to pull back, letting a one-year, grant-funded contract expire this month, and the Isanti County Sheriff’s Office and the cities of West St. Paul, Columbia Heights, Brooklyn Park and Shorewood have also ended or paused their programs.

The cameras have also become targets. As of mid-August, at least seven Minnesota communities had reported vandalized Flock cameras, with devices stolen, smashed, cut down or otherwise damaged in Faribault, Winona, Duluth, Edina, Plymouth, Eden Prairie and Nowthen. All eight of Winona’s cameras were taken between July 29th and August 1st.

Closer to home, St. Cloud and Sartell police have reported at least four damaged cameras. Charges, though, have been rare. Bradley Allen Smith, an 18-year-old Sauk Rapids man, was charged last month with cutting down a plate reader in downtown St. Cloud, one of only two such cases brought in Minnesota so far. He has not been convicted.

The work session is set for 4:30 p.m. at St. Cloud City Hall, ahead of the regular council meeting. It is open to the public, but it is not a public hearing, so there will be no public comment period.

Officials from both the St. Cloud and Sartell police departments answered questions about how the Flock system works and how the data is used in a December interview with KNSI. That story can be found here.

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