Why This Sheriff (Reluctantly) Took Down His Flock Cameras

0:00This is one thing I'm David Ryan and their cameras are watching your car but now in some areas people are watching them come down. I will put it this way if you have a stock and flock I'd be selling it. Stick around. Okay I'm walking up to where the map said this license plate reader would be. This is an extremely busy intersection, for-way intersection just tons of cars. So the other day I went for a walk outside my neighborhood in suburban New Jersey. I've been hearing a lot about these flock automated license plate readers and the backlash against them. How people have been cutting them down or smashing them, raising hell in city council meetings over privacy concerns, more on all that in a bit. So I wanted to see if there were any near me. Turns out this vigilante group called D-Flock has launched a crowdsource map. You can type in your address and it'll show you if there are any cameras nearby.

1:02Yep, there it is. Sure enough about a six minute walk from my house is one of these license plate readers. It's kind of to the left of the main light here but it's staring right as the cars approach the traffic light. Little black camera really blends in because it's painted the same color as the fixture of the traffic light. Dark black. So unless you knew what you were looking for you probably wouldn't be able to see it. And again this is a super busy intersection. People are coming through this area constantly. Now the camera I saw was not a flock camera. But he's make similar ones. But the anger that has been slowly building this year seems almost exclusively directed at flock. We found its cameras have been vandalized in more than 33 states. F*** a flock camera! Did you get that? This guy just drove by and shouted F*** the flock cameras. That seems like basically the sentiment. The company is more than 120,000 cameras across every state except Alaska.

2:06They work by capturing an image of the license plate or distinctive parts of a car like color, make, and model. And that information is stored on a database which can alert police when that plate matches up with information about a stolen vehicle or missing person. But police can also search for specific license plates and not all of those searches have been actually related to crimes. I knew this morning a police officer has been arrested after authorities say he tracked his ex-girlfriend more than 2,000 times. Earlier this month a former Bervaud County deputy of the year resigned after an investigation revealed he logged on to flock cameras to look up his ex-girlfriend's license plate. Then there are the privacy concerns. This guy right here is not just tracking your license plate. It's also tracking debts, bumper stickers, and also who's in your car with you. Concerned citizens have taken to social media and their local city council meetings outraged about mass surveillance. The emperor is a fan of flock. This guy showed up to a city council meeting dressed as Darth Vader to make his point.

3:08And we must continue utilizing flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebels come as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium. A lot of Americans feel like their cars are an extension of their homes. Whether it's realistic or not, they expect some level of privacy even while driving. Critics also point out that these license plate readers gobble up images of any car that passes by, not just those connected to crimes. They say the data sharing between police departments basically amounts to a nationwide dragnet. And they're especially worried about their data being stored on servers for long periods of time or possibly sold to God knows who. The short message to me I'm sorry. I'm sorry that the system has failed you. I'm sorry that you no longer trust the police department that's job is to protect you. And for me, we believe that flock that everyone has a right to feel safe. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has apologized anyone who feels victimized by their technology and called the misuse by officers completely unacceptable.

4:12The company insisted does not track people on foot or use facial recognition technology. It says it will not share access or sell users data. It also rolled out a new series of safeguards last month more than that later in the episode. But that hasn't quite a de-outrage. And now some cities and states are taking action. Happening now, law enforcement agencies and Florida have until the end of the month to remove license plate reading cameras from all of the state roads there. This is after Florida's Department of Transportation revoked all permits due to privacy concerns and reports of police abuse. The Putnam County Sheriff's Office was the first law enforcement agency in our area to discontinue using flock cameras. Shortly after the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, Clay County Sheriff's Office and Nassau County Sheriff's Office followed suit due to the F.MMO. Just this week, flock cameras all across Florida started coming down, including in the city of Oviato, where Dale Coleman is chief of police. If they don't think that this technology is something they can trust the police with, we don't need the tool. Did it help soft crime? Absolutely. But it's not at the expense of the public trust.

5:17But elsewhere in Florida, some law enforcement officials are a little more dubious. What I have never seen is the absolute lies that distorts the distortion of facts that are out there, this mass surveillance program, it's bullf**king. Michael Chitwood is the sheriff of Volusia County, which is on the central east coast of Florida. And after I heard him say that to the TV station WESH, I knew I wanted to talk to him to get a sense of how the law enforcement community is responding to this backlash, why he thinks the technology is useful, and how he's trying to balance concerns about public safety with an erosion of public trust. We spoke on Thursday. So, sheriff, thanks for being here. I wonder if you can start by telling me about your history with flock cameras. Like, when did you first become aware of them, when did you first start using them in the county? I hate to date myself, but I was a police chief in Daytona Beach from 2006 to 2006, 17, actually, six, then the end of 16.

6:20We had a serial killer who struck an O5 and O6 and killed four women. There was an area of the city where the serial killer was praying. A company by the name of NDI was beginning to experiment or explore with these things called tag readers that they had used over in England. So, after I saw the presentation, what we did was we set these tag readers up in a two by two square mile area where the serial killer was praying. While we didn't catch the serial killer, we caught everything else. We caught stolen cars. We caught people who wanted to murder warrants and other states. We were getting sex offenders in there, missing persons in there, and I thought, wow, this is pretty incredible technology. We slowly expanded it to covering the entire city. And then when I got elected sheriff and took office in 2017, we expanded that program throughout the county to where we were a couple days ago, where you could not get in or out of this county without your tag being scanned.

7:26How many license plate readers did you have up in the county? Probably about 185 throughout the entire county. Now, you remember the county geographically is the size of Rhode Island. And then obviously other cities joined on board with us. There were cities that said, hey, we like this technology. We want this technology. We want to be part of your network. And how many of these cameras were flock cameras specifically? The whole system was called the flock system. And all it does is scan the license plate. It can't discern the state. It scans the plate. And if it matches, it sends an alert to the deputies into our crime center. And then they have to verify that it's a Florida tag or an Alabama tag or a New York tag. I mean, flock claims it supported about a million law enforcement investigations last year and helped locate more than 10,000 missing persons. Like CNN hasn't verified that data. But can you tell me a success story you recently had with them where it helped you or another department solve a crime, track down a criminal? I can tell you we just submitted a thing to the major county Shower Association. And it was probably over 100 incidents. But I'll tell you one that it comes to mind.

8:37We had a home invasion robbery about a year ago, middle of the night, front-their gets kicked in and both people get shot and miraculously they survive. And all that we get is a description of a car. And detectives do an amazing, amazing job. They're checking tag readers, they're checking for Ring Doorbell cameras, they're checking. They're checking, they everything that investigators do. And they're able to discern that this car, when it entered a Florida, it took its Georgia tag off and slapped a Florida tag on it. And then continued in. And what this guy had been doing was it turned out it was an ex-boyfriend from years and years and years ago. He had been coming in from Atlanta and stalking this young lady. And then eventually he went in and tried to kill them. And then we were able to then track him through a bunch of other technology to Detroit where the Detroit police eventually took him in the custody. And that was a case where you had zero, zero eyewitnesses. You had nothing. He came in, he was masked. And it was great detective work using great technology that was able to grab a guy who was wanted for a murder.

9:50The number of Alzheimer's patients that we help, you know, they get the keys to the car and the family comes home and he dad's gone. Oh my God, he's got the car and we haven't seen him in hours. And you're able to go in there and you can track this person down because the person would say on I-4 and was doing loops. They would drive 30 miles down, get off, drive 30 miles back. And they were doing this all night long. And eventually you're able to coordinate with four or five other counties saying, hey, this is what we're seeing. What are you seeing? And you're able to recover that Alzheimer's patient before they do any harm to themselves or others. So a lot of the criticism from folks has, you know, been about personal privacy. We can get into that. But there's also the concern about police officers misusing this technology, using it to track people. They're not supposed to be tracking. You've obviously used this technology for a long time. Did you ever have any concerns about this being misused by officers? Well, let me say this to you. Any database in law enforcement, there's the potential for it and it has been misused. There's always that danger. But there are guardrails there. There's a digital footprint when you use that technology.

11:02You know, when you sign in to use what's called our David system, which is our driver's license system, when you get in there, you are prompted with, you have to enter a case number and then you click on an affidavit that you hear by a test that you are what you're about to do is a criminal investigation by that number failure to do so can result in firing prosecution and a civil fine. And that's how that works. Unfortunately, the road police officers, what they did, they should have been fired and they should have been prosecuted for cyber stalking. And my question for police administrators is, while we hire from the human races, what guardrails did you put in place? What training did you give? What did your policy do? Did you have training in place for your department? We did, because what we did was we followed the model of what we do with every other piece of technology that we use in Florida. Any of these criminal justice databases, whether it be driver's license database, whether it's criminal justice database, no matter what it may be, FBI databases, whatever you get into, you have, there's a digital footprint there and it clearly tells you in your policy, misuse, you will be fired and referred for prosecution.

12:12And then obviously we all train on that is the same thing that that training is done yearly about misuse of law enforcement databases and technology. But we hire from the human race, you're going to get it. They didn't do it. They didn't do it. Any favors believe me in this whole process. I mean, yeah, and flock in response to some of this, they rolled out a bunch of new safety features last month, including requiring customers to use a tool that flagged up normal search behavior, requiring users to input a case number for each search, reducing standard data retention from 30 days to seven days, gave local jurisdictions the option to limit how outside agencies can search data. Did all that seem reasonable to you? It seemed reasonable, but it was already there. When we got into the flock system, there is a place where you can have them require a case number, which we did. You can require the 30 day purging. And why the 30 day purging was important was, first of all, courts have ruled most recently as this year in Northfolk, Virginia have ruled that a 30 day retention of those records is completely reasonable as long as you're not building some type of spy data.

13:19So, you're putting out a type of spy database where you're putting out a dragnet there, because if you think of it, when a crime occurs, especially a crime of violence, and you're subpoenaing for other technology, a cell phone technology, maybe it's cameras off a private property, you're not going to get those subpoena back in seven days, you're not going to get back in 14 days. You know, you need to talk to Google in these other places, that's a 21 day return. So, I thought 30 days was fair. We purge at 30 days, and then flock checks to make sure we did that purge. So, there were, and we were working. So, in 2005, we were part of a working group with flock that tried to work through the kinks and the errors that were in there, because again, it's great technology, but all these flaws on the user end are end, and on the administrative end of the house would flock. It sounds like you think this was kind of an imperfect system, and that there was, there were some issues that you were even encountering as you were kind of actively using it. It was, there were issues there that put us in this situation, and I think social media just took off and ran. I was in a community meeting the other night, and the things that they were talking about, were doing facial recognition, were recording people, when they were talking.

14:31And there are all things that are just, or not, are not true, but like Winston Churchill once said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to put his pants on. All right, got to take a break. When we come back, why Sheriff Chipwood took his cameras down? Stick with us. I mean, so this blowback has kind of been building a lot of anger at these community meetings. And this week, the Florida Department of Transportation put out a memo ordering the removal of license plate readers from state roadways. I've no one's given law enforcement more tools than we have, but they need to be targeted at criminals. I don't want things that are sweeping up just everyday citizens. Governor Ron DeSantis also had some harsh words about them called for legislation that will protect Floridians from allowing the state to turn in to some type of digital prison, digital surveillance state.

15:31And not long after that, you wrote on Facebook on Tuesday that you were shutting down LPR's in Volusia County, but you said it was not decision you take lightly that there will be an impact to crime and public safety. You wrote quote, I'm sure there are criminals who will be celebrating this post along with the critics. You don't seem thrilled about taking them down. So why are you going ahead with it? Because I can read the writing on the wall here when the 800 pound gorilla for law enforcement support has been our governor. He has been like no other governor in a state when it comes to supporting law enforcement. When he turns around and makes a statement like that, the writing is on the wall. It's days or weeks before the counties follow suit and just pull the permits because that's how you put them up. And just the other night are joining county, Lake County, their county council voted to pull the permits on the cameras basically putting Lake County out of business. I think the most disappointing thing for me is it's really easy to have a knee jerk reaction in ban everything. It's really easy to throw the baby out with the bath water. But there are so many cases around this state and nobody ever takes the time to interview any of the victims.

16:36You know, the other Lee Ford couple that lost a million dollars to a fraudster that because of tag readers, we were able to track the courier down who picked up the money and get half their life savings back. Nobody, nobody talks to those folks. But I guess I could say that this technology license plate readers and even some of the cell phone stuff that you mentioned, it hasn't been around forever. And still police departments have been able to, you know, kind of fight crime, maintain the public peace. So what is so dire about this particular instance? I will say this to you. If you go back right now and tell me what the national clearance rate is for burglaries. And that number is probably in the teens. That number here in Volusia County is north of 50%. If you go back and look at the numbers for persons crimes, the clearance rate for person crimes, and you look at that number nationwide with that clear the ability of a crime once it occurred, I'll bet you it's in the 40% range or lower. We're almost at 90% when it comes to clearing those crimes. That's the differences. The difference is you're taking more violent criminals.

17:39If it's this is used properly again, it all comes down to good technology and good people's hands. You are seeing a rest in conviction rates in my bellywick of the world. You're seeing much better, more thorough police work and much tighter cases. There's no doubt that there are a tool that can be used. But I guess in your mind, what is the priority ensuring that law enforcement has the best investigative tools or ensuring the public that their privacy is safe and that they have the trust in the public. And that's the key to the trust in law enforcement or these companies that they aren't going to be using the data in a malicious way. So how do you balance that? I couldn't agree with you more. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two things could be true at once. You can have technology with the guardrails on there that guarantees that. And part of doing that is if I could wave a magic wand. I think our attorney general is a brilliant man. You bring all of the stakeholders to the table and you sit in the room and you listen to everybody's concerns and you hammer out a policy.

18:41Well, everybody not agree with it, but at least it's a policy that will build trust and build confidence in what you're trying to do. We had an opportunity to lead. It's easy to capitulate. It's easy to do that. It's really hard to say there are some good things here we're saving. There are things here that need to be completely turned around and the public should have input on what we're doing to protect them. Because I will tell you right now what you're saying is true and it's the thing that the drum is banging. But I've gotten lots and lots of phone calls and emails from my community saying why would you ever do this? Why? We feel so much safer knowing that. Yeah, I mean, I was going to say at the same time you do have cameras in your county that have been literally saw down to the ground, which is what is a crime, by the way, that is a felony vandalism, you know. So at this point, license plate readers as a tool in the state of Florida, would you say that it's just a complete no go at this point? Unless it is mounted on a patrol car, then that is allowed under the governor's directive.

19:43And is that a thing that's happening right now? That's what the system was originally originally they replaced on the dome lights of a patrol car on either side. And as the patrol car drove through a parking lot, whatever it was scanned in the license plates and then alerting the officer or deputy was there. And that technology is really good if you're stationary on the side of a road, but if you're driving around, I really didn't see the benefit to it. Where the true potential came through is when we went static, when we went into that two by two square mile radius where the serial killer was operating, that's where we started getting these hits for cars coming into the city that were stolen in other jurisdictions or suspects for rape and murder and arm robbery as they were coming and going into that same area. And the tag readers were alerting police officers at the time of the beach and they were scooping these these folks up based on those hits. And I guess finally, do you foresee what has played out in Florida could soon come to other states where just the public sentiment becomes too much and you get, you know, governments that kind of had to put their foot down here and start getting rid of this stuff on a broader scale.

20:48That is a great question. Interestingly this morning I was reading an article where the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro is investigating doing the same thing and he's a former prosecutor as they turned general, I believe. I will put this way if you have stock and flock, I'd be selling it. Well, Sherry, what thank you so much for the time and the perspective, I really appreciate it. No, I really appreciate giving me time. We should say, flock gave CNN a statement about the memo from the Florida Department of Transportation. Quote, rather than banning a critical public safety tool, we support thoughtful legislation and strong privacy transparency and accountability guardrails that ensure technologies used responsibly while preserving law enforcement's ability to use effective tools to keep people safe. As I mentioned earlier, flock world.new safeguards last month, including a requirement for all customers to use the audit assistance feature, which flags abnormal search behavior and it'll give local jurisdictions an option to limit how outside agencies can search data from their cameras.

21:55For example, a police department could allow searches related to theft but not to immigration enforcement. However, civil liberties groups were largely not impressed with the changes. The ACLU noted that a feature called evidence mode would allow data to be preserved longer than the new standard of seven days when a search is tied to a case number. It said the changes were just an attempt at fixing a PR problem and that quote, we will continue to analyze the company's proposals fairly and honestly, we just won't be holding our breath. Alright, that's all for now. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to show, make sure you're following the feed so you don't miss anything. I'll talk to you next time. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life Podcast. Last week, there was this important report that dropped that I think got a lot of attention. It's about football and there was this new study in the British Medical Journal, which estimates that of all the NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021. About 878 players, at least 25% of them had confirmed CTE.

23:01That is the disease that is caused by repetitive hits to the brain. So, CNN's resident NFL veteran, Koi Wire, he called me, we called fellow CNN sports anchor Andy Scholes, and we were talking about it. I know as a former player, anytime I forget my keys, if I get a slight headache, it pops in my head. I'm thinking like, man, I hope this is just Andy, do you forget your keys? Be bravely, I'd... Oh, dear, it's supposed to say yes all the time Koi, make me feel better. Sorry. Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Anderson Cooper. On my podcast, all there is, we explore grief and loss in all its complexities. My guess on the podcast is NASCAR Champion in Whole of Famer Kurt Bush, he's grieving the recent death of his younger brother, NASCAR Champion Kyle Bush. I'm trying to grieve in ways to help people, when I want your mom, my dad, and I try to do it where I'm not biting off more than I can chew and then back off a bit.

24:03I'm trying to help everyone get through this and share stories, and it's not going to get any easier, but time will help heal. I have a nice therapist that I worked with towards the twilight of my career. His therapy helped. It has. I embraced it a few years back, whereas the younger teenager, 20-year-old, 30-year-old, nah. Talking grief, building community. That's what the podcast is all about. This is all there is. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.