Manvel mayor reacts following unanimous vote to remove Flock cameras

All those in favor. All those opposed motion passes unanimously 6 to 0. Thank you everyone. Well good evening to you. I'm Caroline Collins. New tonight you just heard city leaders in Manville voted to deflock the city like the flock cameras were talking about. Local leaders they held a big public hearing tonight to hear public comments for or against flock safety camera programs in their community. Now this has been a huge topic for many cities in our viewing area. Fox 26's Jillian Hartman is joining us live outside city hall with what people had to say tonight. Jillian. Yeah so city leaders voted 6 to 0 to stop funding flock cameras here in Manville and joining me now is the mayor Dan Davis. So Dan tell me what this exactly means for flock cameras here in Manville. I appreciate you guys coming out and covering this topic. So in the city of Manville we have 16 operated flock cameras. What we're doing is turning in our 30-day cancellation notice to flock because we are no longer going to appropriate funds for these tools in the future. Within the next 24 to 48 hours our team will be putting cameras on all of the cameras and then moving forward after that 30 days flock cameras for the city specifically will no longer be in operation. What are your concerns with the company flock? The company is flock when you have a nationwide network of data aggregation and sharing when you look at flock and some of the questions that I asked their representatives tonight about things like their flock nova or investigate os or freeform ai it's so much more than just a license plate reader company. What they're doing is they are profiting off of our citizens private data and what they're doing is they're eroding privacy for the sake of public safety but the reality it's just for their stakeholders to receive a better return on their investment. But we heard you peppering questions to those flock representatives over zoom were you able to get any answers? I would say they certainly answered some questions but not directly. I think their answers left more questions than actually answers to what I was looking for. They seem to have some sort of recommendation or thoughts on everything that we've asked but they tried to skate around the questions and ma'am well we have seven core values that we've adopted and we live those out in everything that we do and we look for any vendor that we partner with to also live out those core values so when one's not such as what flock has been and what we saw on display tonight I personally am no longer interested in doing business with them. So you mentioned the concerns but we also heard the benefits of these cameras we heard from the police chief here in the city and the chief deputy at the brazoria county sheriff's office saying that this is a proven public safety tool so what do you have to say to folks who support these flock cameras? Public safety and personal privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive. Our police chief Keith Traylor even mentioned that tonight you can have those two things to together and in mamble our motto for our police department is guardians of the community so we want them to have the tools we want them to have the resources that the equipment that they need to keep our community safe but we're not willing to sacrifice the rights of our citizens in order to achieve that so as we head into the future we'll continue to have conversations about what is the right fit here in mamble because the seat that I hold the seat that the six other council members hold we hold those seats to serve the people of mamble that's what we were elected to do. Well you mentioned before that you support license plate readers so what's the alternative for the city here is there going to be some sort of license plate readers system or program that's an alternative? Right now I'm just interested in getting flock out of the city of mamble and focusing on that and then when the future comes the future will come so right now that's what been what the focus is and I'm not too sure what the future will hold but anything that we do we do it through with transparency accountability and engagement those are the core values we have. Well thank you so much for joining us so the mayor will keep us posted on next steps here in mamble so like you just heard they voted six to zero to stop the funding to cancel the contract and to cover up all the flock cameras here in the city back to you Caroline. Yeah Jillian did you hear at all from police or the police chief tonight? Yeah so the police chief mentioned that this is a proven public safety tool he said that these cameras have really helped solve serious crimes like murders and kidnappings and we also heard from the chief deputy at the county sheriff's office and he says these are essential for a lot of their investigations but also mentioned that these need to be properly regulated and used. Yeah it sounds like some stricter parameters need to be put in place across the board. Jillian thank you for giving us some insight into what happened there tonight.