Nevada State Prison inmates Jesus Jimenez, left and David Harrington inspect Nevada license plates friday morning at the license plate shop within the prison.
SNOHOMISH — City administration last week reaffirmed plans to add Flock-brand license plate reading cameras, which can aid in crime prevention when a car is being sought.
The city plans to post them at three intersections, city administrator Heather Thomas-Murphy said. Residents have raised concerns of misconceptions about wider use.
Police Chief Nathan Alanis spoke in January of plans to put the cameras at the city’s entryways. The Flock recordings are kept private and retained for less than 90 days.
Alanis said the recordings are kept in-house and not shared with the state or feds.
Everett already installed Flock cameras, and Stanwood did earlier this month. Lake Stevens and Monroe are looking to add them. Monroe's City Council was due to vote on purchasing Flock cameras at its meeting this week.
Unlike speed cameras or red light cameras, license-plate readers such as Flock’s scan plate numbers in real time and alert law enforcement if it detects the license plate of a vehicle police want to stop.
Occasionally, the technology has misread license plates that has led to police homing in on innocent drivers, according to the IT security company Compass IT Compliance. These cases have resulted in stops on innocent drivers. However, as a percentage these have been rare — nationally departments with license-plate reader technology cumulatively scan multiple millions of plates. There are only a few dozen news reports of situations where misinterpreted plates misidentifying a car as a stolen car led to police conducting a high-intensity traffic stop with guns drawn on innocent people; the intensity was due to officers’ handling of those stops.
Flock cameras do not have facial-recognition technology, its manufacturer says.
Facial-recognition technology is a touchy subject. That technology uses AI to identify people recorded in public spaces by crosschecking data such as state driver’s license photos already on file.
Tech companies that gained government contracts for this general technology include Microsoft, Amazon and Google. All three faced backlash as far back as 2018, Seattle Times news stories show. Microsoft had a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but the company said this contract wasn’t directly for using its facial-recognition technology. It said its ICE contract was for Azure Government, a more rugged government version of its cloud computing Azure application that processes data.
