Springfield police to deploy license-plate cameras, but haven’t decided how they’ll share data

This story has been updated with information provided Tuesday, July 22 by the Springfield Police Department.

The Springfield Police Department plans to install 25 license-plate-reading cameras in the next few months.

But after initially declining to identify which law enforcement agencies will have access to the data the cameras collect, a top department leader said Tuesday that no such decision has been made.

Information from the cameras will be shared in “cross-jurisdictional investigations,” Springfield Police Lt. George Crolly said in a statement last week, listing coordination with the Eugene Police Department as an example of how the technology helps with “core public safety goals.”

On Tuesday, July 22, Crolly said in a phone interview that decisions on sharing data had not yet been made: “We’re still identifying how we share and who we share information with. Regardless, we will be in compliance with state and local law.”

The technology is known as automated license-plate recognition. Police in Springfield and Eugene say it has helped track suspects in serious crimes, including a man accused of setting a fire at a Springfield manufactured-home community that killed two people. License-plate-recognition cameras allowed the murder suspect to be tracked “across the state of Oregon and into Washington” before his arrest, according to a Springfield police press release.

The “technology enables law enforcement to respond more quickly, investigate with greater precision, and deter crime more effectively,” Crolly said.

The issue of who is allowed access to the license-plate data has drawn intense scrutiny, both in Lane County and nationwide. Flock Safety, the company partnering with Springfield and Eugene police on the camera installations, has emphasized “customizable” sharing options for local police departments.

Last week, Crolly declined to answer when asked when the first camera was installed in Springfield. On Tuesday, Crolly said the first camera has yet to be installed.

A top Eugene police official earlier this month said Oregon’s laws led that agency to narrow the data-sharing network for its camera system.

After first using a regional network that included other states in the Pacific Northwest, “we’ve decided that we only want to share it with Oregon agencies, because we know that they abide by the same sanctuary laws that we are required to abide by as well,” Eugene Police Capt. Jake Burke said at a July 10 meeting of the city’s Police Commission, a citizen advisory group.

At that meeting, more than 15 citizens addressed Burke and those on the police commission to criticize the city’s use of the technology, with several in attendance citing concerns about federal authorities getting access to the data.

Burke said on July 10 that the data is secure, and that should there be such a request to Flock Safety from a federal agency, “they would be required then to have their legal team send it to our legal team to process.”

In Oregon, a sanctuary law prohibits local and state police from assisting with immigration enforcement unless a warrant signed by a judge directs them to take action.

General standards

In Springfield, while Crolly declined to directly answer a question about which law enforcement agencies will have access to the network’s data, he described some general standards for storing and using the data.

“Data is stored securely and used exclusively for law enforcement purposes. The City Attorney’s Office helped ensure full compliance with privacy and legal standards,” Crolly said, adding that Springfield police has “taken steps to ensure this technology protects privacy and complies with all city and state laws.”

Both the Springfield and Eugene police departments have struck deals with the private company, Flock Safety, to install the camera systems. Crolly said a $93,000 grant from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission to fight organized retail theft is being used to pay for the cameras.

Eugene police, which installed their first license-plate-reading camera in May, are using a similar grant in the amount of $391,264 to install 57 cameras.

Widely used technology 

The technology is far from new. It has been used by Oregon police departments for more than 10 years.

It’s also increasingly common. A 2020 survey by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that about 75% of U.S. police departments serving populations the size of Eugene made use of license-plate recognition technology. About 57% of departments serving a population similar to Springfield made use of the technology, according to the survey.

But while Flock Safety has stressed that local departments make decisions on how to share the data collected by the camera readers, published reports have shown how, in California, for example, documented uses of data-sharing seem to have gone beyond what’s been envisioned by state lawmakers.

A review of public records by The San Francisco Standard showed requests to access data that were fulfilled by police in Oakland, California.

The logs “show every time the Oakland Police Department searched its network of plate readers or granted other agencies access to its data,” the Standard reported, with each entry showing “the requesting agency, reason for the request, time of submission, and the number of Flock networks included in the search.”

“In most instances, the (Oakland Police Department) didn’t appear to share information directly with the federal agencies. Rather, other California police departments searched the OPD’s system with keywords in the ‘reason’ column related to federal law enforcement agencies more than 200 times — providing reasons such as ‘FBI investigation’ for the searches,” the Standard reported.

In California, a state law prohibits the sharing of automated license-plate recognition data with federal law enforcement agencies. One of the requests fulfilled by Oakland police referred to assisting with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation, the Standard reported.

Oakland police issued a lengthy statement in response to the article, saying that no one within the department shared information with ICE, though acknowledging that other state law enforcement agencies have access to data from Oakland’s cameras.

The use of Flock Safety data in particular led the company’s CEO to write a lengthy blog post explaining how data is shared.

“This limited, defined network has a system administrator, who can share the data collected by their devices with other law enforcement agencies if they choose to do so,” according to the blog post, published last month and signed by the company’s CEO, Garrett Langley.

Flock has a “National Lookup” network that allows “police to search for the full plate number of one specific, known license plate (only a complete license plate) across cameras that other police departments have also opted in to share with this network,” according to Langley’s post.

That’s not the only customizable data-sharing option, however.

“(P)olice departments can choose to share camera access with other PDs, in order to solve cross-jurisdictional crime, on a 1:1 basis (one PD to one PD), within a specific geographic radius (sharing with all agencies within 10 miles, for example), or within their state,” the blog post states.

“Agencies can also elect not to share any data outside their own agency, or remove themselves from sharing at any time.”