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There’s no more important currency in local government than trust.
The gears of local policy turn best when citizens trust elected representatives to work on their behalf. City councils are better prepared to answer to their constituents when they trust the actions of city administrators. And administrators, like a city manager and police chief, do their jobs best when they know the partnerships they sign with contractors and vendors won’t be used in a way that violates the public’s trust.
That’s why we applaud Eugene City Manager Sarah Medary’s announcement this week that 57 traffic cameras operated by Flock Safety will be shut off until the Eugene City Council can discuss potential changes in the city’s contract with the license-plate reading technology company.
The core issue behind the tension over the cameras isn’t about public safety. It’s about the ownership of license-plate data that Flock collects, and who can access it.
More than 4,000 police departments around the country contract with Flock. In recent months, law enforcement agencies in jurisdictions like Illinois and Texas have shared license-plate data collected by the cameras for the purpose of supporting federal deportation efforts prioritized by the Trump administration, and to monitor women seeking abortions.
Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner has repeatedly touted the success of Flock cameras in solving crimes, including the recent arrest of seven suspects accused in a string of burglaries targeting Asian residents.
Skinner isn’t wrong to do so. We take his argument seriously. Given the personnel and funding limitations his department has to deal with, it’s only natural that he would want to use the latest technology to augment the crime-fighting resources he has. The same is true for Springfield Police Chief Jami Resch, who will discuss the 24 Flock cameras the department has installed but not yet activated with the City Council on Monday. And for Lane County Sheriff Carl Wilkerson, whose department ordered 22 Flock cameras in August.
But there are counterbalancing questions to ask any time new technologies are deployed for the purpose of public safety: What are we giving up? And how can these systems be abused?
It’s not just about this technology, or this presidential administration. After all, the Biden and Obama administrations were often just as eager to collect personal data as is the current one.
We don’t like the FBI or Department of Homeland Security getting a hold of our text messages or geolocating our whereabouts from our cell phones without probable cause.
For the same reason, Flock’s reliance on cloud storage makes it ripe for abuse. The likelihood for such abuse has only risen this year. The Trump administration has sought to get around state laws prohibiting state and local law enforcement from using resources to assist federal immigration enforcement without a court order. At this point, too, we have little idea what future administrations intent on pushing their own priorities might do.
Which brings us back to the issue of trust. We aren’t opposed to the use of license-plate reader technology in principle. But unfortunately, this is not a time when we can trust the federal government to respect the norms of trustworthiness.
Local government must operate differently. Eugene residents deserve to trust their City Council. Councilors need to trust the full-time staff who carry out the city’s work. And those staff need to trust the vendors they contract with. If just one link in that chain is broken, then the cameras need to be turned off until we have that trust.
Medary’s decision back in March to sign a contract with Flock Safety, without informing the City Council or public, ignited the controversy that has erupted over the cameras. Now Medary has done the right thing by giving all sides – the Eugene Police Department, city councilors, city attorneys and the public – a much-needed reset.
