The growing debate over Flock public surveillance cameras and whether they could violate constitutional protections played out before Marshall County Commissioners Monday.
The commissioners voted 3-0 to move to annual contracts with Flock Safety. Currently the county has a two-year contract with the company that automatically renews if neither party wants changes.
Their current contract ends in September of next year. Commissioner Adam Faulstich said he reviewed audit reports of how the county prosecutor, Plymouth and Bremen police used the Flock system from June 15 to July 15. Combined the three entities searched their license plate reader data 407 times.
Faulstich said that seemed OK but he was alarmed that out-of-state agencies queried Bremen’s system 540,000 times over that month.
“That’s almost 10 times per minute, which I don’t think is necessarily humanly possible," Faustich said. "It almost seems like there would be a computer in the background arbitrarily just kind of hitting us up and seeing what’s there.”
Commissioner Jesse Bohannon said he’s concerned that about half the queries in the audit report didn’t have a criminal case number.
“I don’t philosophically agree with preemptively collecting data on people before we have reasonable suspicion that they may have committed a crime,” Bohannon said.
The county has until mid-July of next year to notify Flock that it’s switching to annual contracts. Commissioners President Stan Klotz said he’s trying to get a Flock representative to appear before commissioners to answer questions.
