Policing technology in local communities
By Stacy Gittleman
According to Bloomfield Township police officers, on February 4 patrol officers tracked the driver of the gold Cadillac, Mohamad Qasim Al-Amiri, at his Dearborn Heights home. They recovered a toy black plastic handgun under the driver’s seat of the gold Cadillac, as described by the victim and witness. The man was arrested for assault and arraigned on February 5 at the 48th District Court by Magistrate Nelson-Klein.
According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 70 percent of the nation’s crimes are committed with a vehicle. Each time a crime is committed, whether on foot or with a set of wheels, such as the one described above or a home invasion, robbery, theft, civil rights violation, assault, or vandalism, the first question is often asked: were there any cameras in the area to catch the crime?
As law enforcement resources become increasingly stretched, many law enforcement departments have begun to harness the capabilities of high-technology cameras to investigate crimes and sometimes use footage from body cameras used by law enforcement to exonerate charges made against them during heated interactions.
Body cameras, which have become commonplace, are a technology generally welcomed by both the public and the officers who wear them. They provide another layer of oversight that can protect one’s civil rights during an altercation and a tool that can also exonerate an officer accused of misconduct.
Kathryn James is a partner with the Detroit law firm Goodman Hurwitz & James, P.C., and specializes in police brutality and discrimination cases.
In terms of camera technology in police work, she said that the introduction of body cameras is a positive development both for the officers who wear them and people who interact with officers either in altercations, traffic stops or at political demonstrations. In some cases, her firm relies on footage from cameras to represent clients or family members of victims who may have been severely injured or even killed during an altercation with police.
When James began defending civil rights cases, including those who were wrongfully treated during police stops, she relied on footage taken from dash cams mounted on police cars, which were not very reliable.
“We relied on these as objective recordings of interactions between police and potential victims, although the views from these cameras were somewhat limited,” James said. “Body cameras increased our ability to get a more accurate feel for what happened. During an interaction with police, people’s perceptions and memories can be muddled because they may have been in distress. The footage from body cameras gives us an objective perspective and is a marked improvement over dash cams to fairly assess our clients’ claims. In general, body cameras on police are a positive public asset.”
However, James said she is apprehensive that some of her firm’s clients from Detroit have been unnecessarily tracked and their First Amendment rights potentially trampled when law enforcement uses surveillance cameras and equipment to keep a digital eye on people with certain political leanings. Her firm is especially concerned about the rights of clients who participated in Black Lives Matter or pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent years.
In and around downtown areas, public parking decks, municipal buildings, and sometimes in retail and restaurant districts, law enforcement departments have installed hundreds of security and surveillance cameras. If a person is looking to commit a crime, law enforcement officials say they may think twice if they know there are cameras to catch them in the act. In places like Birmingham’s parking decks, new 360-degree cameras are useful for recording car thefts, break-ins, or assaults. Footage from them can also help solve disputes between motorists during a fender bender.
In the last decade, the technology that has quickly become the darling of law enforcement investigations is the ALPRs that helped Bloomfield Township Police catch the alleged gunman on Telegraph Road. These cameras, either affixed on a stationary pole over a main thoroughfare or mounted in police cars, capture and store images of rear vehicle license plates. According to a 2020 report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy center at New York University School of Law, law enforcement officials around the nation are drawing data from tens of thousands of such cameras.
Between 2016 and 2017, 173 law enforcement agencies scanned 2.5 billion license plates. According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 93 percent of police departments in cities with populations of one million or more use their own ALPR systems, some of which can scan nearly 2,000 license plates per minute. Photos of the license plates are then stored for a finite time. All departments interviewed for this story keep their data for 30 days and share only selected photographs on a regimented and selective basis with other municipalities.
Photographs are matched against federal databases, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the database contains license plate information of suspected or “hot-listed” vehicles used in crimes such as missing or unidentified persons, theft, gun possession, or other wanted persons. If a license plate in a local system matches a hot-listed plate, the software will alert local law enforcement.
As law enforcement departments feel the pinch from tighter budgets and a shrinking pool of qualified applicants to join their ranks, they are leaning harder on these technologies to help investigate and solve crimes.
Officials say that using photos from these databases and then matching them up with the license plate numbers captured on the cameras – as in the case with tracking down the man from Dearborn Heights – is far easier than driving around their beat and asking every gas station or convenience store attendant if they noticed a certain car with a few digits from a partial license plate record recalled by another witness.
Our license plates are regularly photographed to pay fees and tolls on highways, bridges, or parking decks. But civil liberty and grassroots organizations are raising alarm bells and posing potential situations that data collected by law enforcement can be sold and used by third parties with sinister, privacy-invading intentions.
The biggest manufacturer of ALPRs used by law enforcement departments nationwide is an Atlanta company called Flock Safety Camera. Flock was founded in 2017. According to its website, its mission is to scale public safety technology to a national level.
Flock was contacted multiple times for comment but did not respond to requests.
For transparency’s sake, when a municipality contracts with Flock, it can create a web landing page on its public website. In places like Troy and Ferndale, viewers can learn how many cameras a city has purchased and how many hot-listed cars have been detected in the last 30 days.
Michigan has no statewide law regulating the use of ALPRs. Each municipality creates individual policies, which include accepted and prohibited uses of the data and who is authorized to look at the data. All departments interviewed by Downtown stated that it is prohibited for the data to be used for immigration or traffic enforcement, checking for expired vehicle registration, harassment, or intimidation. It is also prohibited to use the license photographs to target a driver based solely on a protected class such as race, sex or religion.
The use of ALPRs in Michigan has sparked individual privacy debates and legal cases. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published reports on abuses of the cameras in 2013 and 2022. Because states are passing laws that make it illegal for people to even cross state lines to obtain an abortion, the ACLU is especially concerned about abusing license plate databases to track a car traveling to take a woman to receive reproductive healthcare.
The ACLU said that Ypsilanti Township banned the use of ALPRs after residents spoke out against a proposal to install them.
The organization argues that the widespread presence of these cameras constitutes as tracking people without cause and pushes the boundaries of search and seizure rights found in the Fourth Amendment.
A case of Fourth Amendment violations has yet to be brought to Michigan’s courts. However, there have been cases such as People v. Frederick (2017), where the Michigan Supreme Court deemed the necessity of attaining a search warrant for tracking individuals over global positioning systems, or as they travel between cellular towers. These cases have opened the door to suggest that increased presence of ALPRs pose a threat of continuous monitoring of individuals and could also face examination in the courts.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the court system has not yet required a warrant or other heightened standard for police officers to take pictures of individual license plates and compare them against a law enforcement database. This is because there is no expectation of the privacy of one’s license plate when driving on public roadways, and precedent holds that drivers on public roads cannot expect their movements to be kept private from the police since they could be observed by any member of the public.
A 2013 ACLU report cited a study out of the University of Maryland that revealed just 47 license plates out of one million photographed were involved with a crime. If a photo is blurry and does not accurately capture the alphanumeric details of a plate, the ACLU reported that artificial intelligence guesses what the remaining digits can be. This can lead to the possibility of innocent motorists being pulled over mistakenly, and sometimes this can lead to violent altercations between police and unknowing motorists.
The 2022 ACLU report alleged that Flock wants to sell its products to local law enforcement departments so it can create a large, centralized network of data that can eventually be accessed by private parties. The ACLU is concerned that what begins with the use of ALPRs can expand into other forms of surveillance technology that will be easier to install and implement once the initial ALPR devices are already up and running.
Philip Mayor, a senior staff attorney with ACLU Michigan, pointed to a 2023 case where the Detroit Police Department was sued for allegedly violently arresting a woman for driving a car that was mistakenly identified by using an ALPR photograph. Her car was mistakenly identified as one used in a drive-by shooting. The woman and her young disabled child were placed in the back of a squad car.
“This shows us that too many times law enforcement departments are using mass surveillance technology as a false aid to solve crimes,” Mayor said. “Any of us who put an overreliance in GPS technology for directions, only to turn down the wrong street can understand how this can happen.”
Mayor said that such mistakes can be avoided if law enforcement uses data from ALPRs only as a preliminary part of their investigations before making an arrest.
“Flock camera technology presents a huge number of civil liberties concerns because they are able to track people from place to place, and that implicates a possible violation of the Fourth Amendment,” Mayor added. “There is a huge concern about how the data can be shared and accessed. That includes fears that information will be shared with (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement).”
While there is no statewide policy in Michigan regulating how law enforcement uses ALPRs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 16 states have statutes that address how private or government entities can use ALPRs and retain data from them. The strictest state law is in New Hampshire, which restricts the use of automated license plate readers to local, county and state law enforcement officers and prohibits the recording or transmitting of license plate numbers, which must be purged from any system three minutes after they are captured unless the number resulted in an arrest, a citation or protective custody or identified a vehicle that was the subject of a missing or wanted person broadcast.
According to Mayor, the public is approaching an era where the ubiquitousness of security and surveillance cameras, microphones, license plate readers, and facial recognition technology are creating a “dragnet” climate for collecting data on individuals by law enforcement.
“We are approaching a time when law enforcement has an entire web of (surveillance technology) tracking us that is unprecedented and extremely dangerous,” Mayor said.
Chad Marlow is a senior counsel at National ACLU who focuses on privacy, surveillance, and technology. He said that the organization does not oppose using ALPRs in certain circumstances, adding that there are times when the data from ALPRs is quite necessary, such as tracking a vehicle involved in a missing child Amber Alert or stolen vehicles.
“The main concern we have is with Flock,” Marlow said. “They have a scalable business model that makes it the camera everyone wants to buy. That’s because you are getting more than the hardware. You have access to their database stored on the cloud. They are creating this nationwide and perhaps even worldwide network of license plate readers that anyone can read.”
Marlow said individual police departments are contracting with the company because it is the path of least resistance. It is the company that neighboring departments are signing contracts with. Marlow’s concern is that these departments may not read the fine print of those contracts. While the ACLU provides law enforcement departments with suggested templates that use better language to include in their contract, few are taking the organization up on its resources.
“If the police departments were on the ball, they would sit down with their local ACLU affiliate and ask, ‘How do I revise this contract to make it safe and limit who gets our data?’,” Marlow said. “Then it is possible to use Flock cameras safely. But most law departments lack the bandwidth, staff or curiosity to go through their contracts and make the changes.”
Marlow added that residents should be aware if their municipality is proposing to install the cameras, they can express their opposition to their town and city councils, writing opinion pieces to their local media or vocally opposing them on social media.
ACLU studies said that tracking people’s vehicles can potentially give law enforcement or third parties – from private companies to the federal government – the ability to compile data on an individual’s legal yet private activities.
The 2022 study stated: “People can engage in a lot of perfectly legal yet private behavior. Movements that would reveal things about their political, financial, sexual, religious, or medical lives that nobody in the police or a company like Flock has a right to track.”
Yet, when asked, Marlow could not point to a specific case or instance when a government or law enforcement authority had tracked an individual due to their political leanings or unnecessarily because of data they pulled from the license plate readers.
“That is difficult for me to illustrate because no local law enforcement jurisdiction is sharing with the ACLU or any other civil rights organization how they are using Flock technology,” Marlow said. “Law enforcement has to tell its constituents that it is using the technology, but they are not sharing how they use it. All we have to go on is to see how aggressively Flock is advertising itself to local law enforcement as building a nationwide network of cameras.”
He continued: “I don’t have an exact situation. But we can imagine a scenario where there are two neighboring police departments with differing policing philosophies or political leanings. They may decide that they want to look for someone in a neighboring town for someone who has different political leanings than their own and then use the Flock database and access the database of a different town to gain information on that person. The Flock agreement states that an entity with a contract is allowed to access its data.”
Marlow said that Flock is deceiving local law enforcement who believe the cameras are only collecting alphanumeric data of license plates and not additional identifiers, such as a bumper sticker.
“Flock cameras can capture the bumper stickers, so someone can search for a car by inputting the wording of a bumper sticker,” insisted Marlow. “That’s the problem with Flock. Police departments do not know what they are signing up for or what this company is doing. And while a police force may trust their personnel, they don’t know if they can trust that personnel in neighboring forces that might abuse access to the Flock data.”
Locally, law enforcement agencies are putting technology to work in a variety of ways.
The city of Birmingham has seven Flock LPRs fixed at its city limits and one mobile camera on a patrol car.
“These cameras are not used for traffic monitoring or even catching speeders,” Birmingham Police Chief Scott Grewe said. “But if we had a scenario where there was a reckless driver that caused an accident and sped away, someone may have been able to describe the make and model of the car but did not get the license plate number. In the past, if we didn’t have that plate number, we would not have enough information to develop a case to pursue a suspect. But with the Flock cameras, we can search for the description of that vehicle in the timeframe of the incident. Any vehicle that matched that description will come up in that database, and we will also have their license plate numbers. Now our investigators have a suspect lead to go on.”
Another example that Grewe mentioned was a recent case of larceny. A witness saw the perpetrator get away in a car but did not get the license plate number. Through its Flock cameras, Birmingham police searched for the car’s descriptive details, matched the plate number, and apprehended the suspect, all within hours of the crime.
“Before we had Flock cameras, we would have incomplete information of an unknown vehicle that left the scene of a crime,” Grewe said. “We would be unable to identify that suspect. The information we get from Flock cameras has been extremely helpful in investigating and solving crimes. The days of us not being able to identify an unknown vehicle driving away are pretty much long gone.”
Grewe said Birmingham is also replacing its squad car cameras, though they are not Flock license plate readers. He said the city created its policy system within the framework of standards created by the Michigan Association of the Chiefs of Police.
When asked if Birmingham police would share information on a license plate with a neighboring town, the chief said that depends on the situation.
“If we are on the lookout of a suspect and we identify their car through a Flock camera, and that car reads back with an address from another municipality, we are not going to call that department to notify them that a person suspected of a crime in Birmingham had a car with an address that traced back to their town.”
Instead, Grewe said this information is shared through a multi-jurisdiction task force that includes Troy and its special investigations unit.
“If my task force officer that’s assigned to the Special Investigations Unit team is investigating a case that happened here in Birmingham, and we have gathered information on a suspect vehicle with Flock data, the team will work to attempt to arrest that suspect. So that is how we share the data. We are not going to just broadcast it out to all other agencies.”
Aside from license plate readers, Birmingham police added body cameras in 2020 and in 2024 the city contracted with the company D/A Central to replace an aging set of security cameras within municipal buildings and parking decks. The outgoing cameras were installed shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. The cost for the project was budgeted for fiscal year 2025 at $890,000. It will replace 46 existing surveillance cameras around the city and add 57 new cameras to the city’s parking system.
In total, Birmingham uses 126 surveillance cameras. This includes 46 inside the police headquarters offices, booking rooms, prison cells, and around the outside of the building. There are also cameras in the city’s five public parking decks, at City Hall, Shain and Booth parks, and the downtown retail district.
As of early February, Grewe said the city is halfway through the project of replacing its cameras.
Footage from these cameras generally stays in the department’s system for 30 days. The cameras are not continuously monitored, but all are visible from the department’s dispatch headquarters, where trained officers can detect suspicious activity.
“Our new cameras do not use facial recognition,” Grewe said. “If a crime such as theft or retail fraud is committed downtown and a witness said the assailant wore blue pants and a red shirt, we can go on that. We can enter these specifics into our system, and it will pull up images of people that match this description.”
In Bloomfield Township, Police Chief James Gallagher said the township in 2023 installed nine license plate reader cameras and nine more in 2024 at a cost of about $3,000 per camera. Flock recommended 31 cameras for the township, but Gallagher said they would prefer to build on the existing system, explaining that adjacent communities will share data.
None of the cameras have facial recognition capability. Looking ahead, Gallagher asserted that when the township signed on with Flock, he was told that the company had no plans to expand into facial recognition software.
“There can be no facial recognition technology ever added to these license plate readers,” maintained Gallagher. “That is something we agreed on when the sale was approved by the township board. If (Flock) ever started to use this technology, we would have to reapproach our contract. These cameras briefly take a picture of a license plate and the rear of a vehicle. These photos do not reveal how many passengers are in the vehicle, nor to the photos give details such as gender, ethnicity or race.”
In private and retail spaces, we have become accustomed to having our faces recorded on hundreds of security cameras. But when it comes to government entities using facial recognition software, Gallagher said that crosses a line.
“It boils down to privacy,” Gallagher said. “There are cameras in many places, but when the government is controlling it, that’s a different story. We are trying to be as transparent as possible with the public. We do not want our residents uncomfortable with the kind of technology we are using.”
In the workshops he has attended about facial recognition, Gallagher said law enforcement departments must jump through many hoops to use the technology in criminal investigations.
Gallagher said data from ALPRs came in handy to solve a home invasion case in the summer of 2024 around Quarton and Wing Lake Roads. Bloomfield Township lost track of a car they were pursuing. Later, images from ALPRs in multiple locations gave officers a timeline of the whereabouts of that vehicle and placed it on Telegraph Road five minutes before the home invasion, giving officers highly valued information for their investigation.
In another case, Bloomfield Township police, after an eight-hour search, were able to locate an elderly person with dementia who was reported missing after she took out her car for a drive. By knowing the license plate number, the department detected that her car was repeatedly taking the wrong turn and passing the same location every 45 minutes. Eventually, police found the woman driving in Ferndale.
When it comes to people’s privacy regarding how we show our beliefs on our bumper stickers, Gallagher said that law enforcement is held to higher standards than other private entities who may be using these same readers in vehicles, such as repossession and towing companies.
“I can understand how some may feel this technology can seem a bit ‘Big Brotherish,’” Gallagher said. “But we must adhere to policies. We must follow the laws. There are safeguards out there to make sure law enforcement is not abusing the data we collect.”
Bloomfield Township Community Outreach Officer Heather Glowacz said that the Flock cameras are also beginning to be installed by homeowners associations. Those cameras are paid for through the associations.. Occasionally, an association will share data with police if suspicious activity arises, she said.
The township launched an “Extra Eyes” program that allows private residents and homeowners associations to register their cameras with the department.
“Our residents like these cameras,” Glowacz said. “They have paid out of pocket to install them in their own neighborhoods.”
Bloomfield Township officials approved the purchase of body cameras for police officers in 2021.
Neighboring communities are also employing technology as part of law enforcement efforts.
Troy, which admittedly lacks a walkable, pedestrian-friendly downtown, does not use street-level surveillance cameras. But since the spring of 2024, it has deployed 27 Flock cameras, which are placed along busy roadways at its city limits.
For transparency, the city has a Flock Safety landing page on its website, where it gives a brief outline of its camera policy, acceptable and prohibited uses of Flock data, and the types of national hot-lists it receives alerts from. As of February 10, Troy documented 1,893 hot-listed vehicles driving on its streets. Hot-listed vehicles detected from a camera must be verified by a human before warranting a pursuit or arrest.
Troy Chief of Police Josh Jones said the cameras are a game changer when it comes to helping to solve crime.
“I have been in law enforcement for 25 years, and in all this time, the fact that most crimes are committed in stolen vehicles has remained consistent,” Jones said. “This technology allows stolen vehicles to be identified just by driving down the road. We do not need to rely on someone seeing that car and identifying its license plate number. Once a license plate number is captured, we can run it through a database. Then, we can alert our patrols and those of neighboring cities to the location of that vehicle. That’s the biggest and most simple example of what these cameras are good for. It’s not just about the crime of stealing a vehicle but what other crimes can be committed while driving that stolen vehicle.”
Jones said installing the cameras around Troy, along with Flock’s straightforward training, has enhanced the capabilities of the city’s already “robust” investigative department.
“We have seen how police departments in neighboring communities were already putting these cameras to good use,” Jones said. “It’s a trend that made a lot of sense to us.”
Jones said Troy’s agreement with Flock states that it will not share its data with the company, nor can the company access Troy’s data and sell it to a third-party vendor.
“I cannot imagine why Flock would want to sell the data to a third party,” Jones said. “I disagree with the ACLU’s claim about Flock selling or keeping our data. Using these cameras was a substantial commitment taken on by my department. We thoroughly researched the product and explained to the city council what we intended to do with the collected information. The images captured are not intrusive to people’s privacy. The cameras photograph the back of the car and the license plate only, which is visible to the public. The Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that there should be no expectations of privacy when it comes to a vehicle’s license plate, and this is the basis of Flock’s business model. There are policies in place to prevent against misuse.”
In West Bloomfield, the township’s 82 police officers are outfitted with a body camera. In 2022, the department budget included $3,500 for additions to body cameras and surveillance camera equipment.
“It is the expectation that uniformed officers on patrol will wear the body cameras during their entire shift,” explained West Bloomfield Deputy Chief Dale Young. “The department has clear policies dictating when the cameras must be activated and when they can be turned off.”
Young added that the body camera footage can serve as important evidence in court. The department will often send body camera video to the prosecutor’s office to help them make decisions on whether to write warrants for cases.
When it comes to surveillance cameras, the township mainly places them around the buildings of its civic center complex on Walnut Lake Road.
However, Young acknowledged the potential for public-private partnerships, where businesses or residents could voluntarily integrate their private surveillance systems with the police department. “We would be open to [that] in the future,” he said, while also noting the need to carefully define the parameters of such arrangements to protect individual privacy.
In its 2024-2025 budget, the West Bloomfield Detective Bureau requested to spend $60,000 for the installation and contract for up to 22 Flock LPR cameras to be placed on the township borderlines. Flock cameras can be spotted in high-traffic areas such as the traffic circle on Orchard Lake Road and 14 Mile.
Looking ahead, the department is also contracting with Axon to install their license plate readers on all their patrol cars. The cameras should be fully operational in squad cars by this spring. Axon is the same company from which the township purchases its body cameras and taser equipment.
Young said data from license plate readers is valued for evidence in fighting crime and locating missing persons. “License plate readers are one of the great advancements as far as investigative tools go,” he said. The department is also transitioning to a new in-car license plate reader system from Axon, which will complement the existing stationary Flock Safety cameras.
Young said combining the capabilities of stationary and mobile license plate readers could offer police unique capabilities when it comes to solving cases such as bank robbers leaving the scene of a crime or missing persons alerts.
“The advantage of having a stationary Flock camera is that it is in a fixed spot, pointing in one direction and will photograph every license plate that passes by,” Young said. “When you put a license plate reader in a patrol car, it is helpful for when we are on an active chase when a crime is committed. Last year, these cameras could have come in handy when we were searching for suspects who got away in a car after they robbed a bank on Haggerty Road. If we had these cameras installed, we might have been able to capture the plate of the suspect that was trying to leave, and then our detectives would be able to go back to look at data from other cameras to see if they could develop a suspect vehicle based on this information.”
Ferndale has seen the most pushback on camera technology in law enforcement.
Grassroots organizations like the Ferndale Inclusion Network (FIN) believe there is a disproportionate number of ALPRs along the streets along the Ferndale/Detroit border. Though all law enforcement departments interviewed said that these cameras mainly reside along city limits, the FIN views this as a practice of over policing Black and Brown drivers.
FIN co-founder Kathleen LaTosch said there have been instances where police mistakenly pull over motorists, often Black, who may have a similar but not exact license plate number of a car used in a crime.
“What is most concerning to use about the cameras used is that Ferndale has a history of problematic racial profiling,” LaTosch said. “People of color are more likely to be harmed in a police stop than at any other time. Ten of the 16 license plate camera readers are placed at the Eight Mile border of Ferndale and Detroit.”
LaTosch said Ferndale police have released their statistics about the number of hits these cameras produce of cars that are hot-listed. In reality, Woodward Avenue has a higher rate of hot-listed vehicles traveling on it, but Ferndale points most of its license plate readers at the Detroit border on Eight Mile. LaTosch views this as an over-policing of Detroit motorists.
LaTosch added that in 2020, the Ferndale City Council passed a resolution to perform a racial impact assessment to determine if any policies were harming minorities.
FIN determined that the deployment of license plate readers has done little in the way of keeping Ferndale’s streets safer. Once Ferndale installed the readers, the Ferndale Inclusion Network asked the city to perform a racial assessment study.
“There is a fundamental problem with the constant use of Flock technology taking photographs of everyone’s license plates,” said Ferndale resident Prasad Venugopal, who is also involved in the organization. “The ACLU in 2020 concluded that 99 percent of all the license plates captured with Flock cameras are not connected with crime. The technology itself relies on maintaining this big data that Flock owns. The data is shared with everybody and across all police departments. Ordinary Americans are being surveilled constantly by these license plate readers despite not having committed any crime or being suspected of it.”
Venugopal said that the camera’s abilities are not always accurate and uses AI technology to fill in the guesswork of missed numbers and letters on a license plate. He is also concerned that the cameras can take photos of people who may be standing around a car or the color of the vehicle.
The organization’s concerns go as far as fearing that imagery from license plate readers could someday be weaponized to track a vehicle with someone who is driving to a clinic to get an abortion or receive gender affirming care or to round up undocumented immigrants.
Like Birmingham, Ferndale uses surveillance cameras around public spaces in its downtown area, including around ballot boxes, City Hall and the police department. Ferndale also installed cameras in the restroom of a public park that was regularly vandalized. Under a city ordinance, facial recognition features in these cameras are prohibited.
Ferndale Chief of Police Dennis Emmi has heard from downtown business owners who want more cameras around their stores and restaurants to deter criminal activity. That would require cameras with higher resolution capabilities, which the city does not use.
“We place these cameras around town sparingly,” Emmi said. “We have a town ordinance that limits the use of surveillance cameras and how long we can retain recordings. I wish we could have more cameras because it is a law enforcement multiplier. It helps us to monitor certain areas without having to dispatch officers. We mainly use the cameras to keep an eye on some of the more expensive amenities we have installed to improve the quality of life in downtown Ferndale.”
Ferndale police mandates that every one of its officers use a body camera for the duration of their shift. Retention of video footage varies depending on the types of interactions with the public. While the retention schedule is generally 30 days, it may be longer for contested traffic stops or criminal investigations.
Ferndale Police began using Flock camera data from neighboring municipalities beginning in 2022. When they evaluated the success in solving crimes with the equipment, Ferndale installed the cameras in 2023.
“It was my staff that presented the idea of Flock cameras to me,” Emmi said. “They told me the technology can make their investigations more efficient and would cut down the time wasted on false leads, randomly asking potential bystanders if they saw a certain car drive by or using video surveillance cameras that can often be unreliable. The cameras have been a game changer for my investigators.”
Ferndale has 27 Flock cameras installed in its jurisdiction. As of February 3, Ferndale’s dashboard recorded 372,455 license plates in the last 30 days, with 546 of those vehicles being hot-listed. Ferndale parking authorities also use a separate ALPR system to enforce residential parking permits.
Last May, Ferndale police used images from a Flock camera to track an aggressive Hazel Park woman who was charged with felony assault in Ferndale after police say she rammed her car into an Uber Eats delivery car driven by another woman who refused to deliver to the suspect’s residence.
Responding to Ferndale Inclusion Network’s concerns and allegations, Emmi said the cameras do not take descriptor information that would reveal a driver’s political or social leanings, do not use facial recognition, and the data cannot be used by ICE. He added that the department is examining the count of hot-listed cars detected on some of the Flock cameras at the Ferndale-Detroit border and is taking down some cameras with the lowest counts.
“Leveraging technology to become more efficient or to be a force multiplier is a must,” Emmi said. “Resources for law enforcement are dwindling. We’re getting less and less money for our department, not more. So, efficiency is everything.”
Before contracting with Flock, Emmi knew there was skepticism in the community about the technology in terms of privacy rights. He and his colleagues attended workshops and seminars about license plate readers and had engagement sessions with the city’s mayor, city council, and then the community.
“Ultimately, we determined that we have been charged with making Ferndale safer, to solve crimes more quickly, and to look out for the rights of the victims of crimes,” Emmi said. “We vet the policies of other departments that want to share our network or share our cameras to make sure that their policy and oversight are consistent with ours. If it’s not, we have refused access to our data.”
