Flock out, Axon in: Kenosha police lead surveillance tech shift

Wisconsin are covering up cameras and canceling contracts as the backlash against flock safety continues to gain steam. But Fox six investigator Brian Paulson shows you why a I powered vehicle tracking is not going away anytime soon. Hey Ted and Kim flock. We've talked a lot about it lately. It may be the current poster child of government surveillance overreach, but it's far from the only player in the game and our investigation finds at least one community that quietly signed a long term deal with the flock competitor that already has a strong foothold in police technology. Get down on the ground. Make no mistake down face down. Locked cameras are helping police catch dangerous criminals. It is finding amber alerts and stolen cars and it is actually doing good things. But the company's nationwide network of more than 120,000 automated license plate reading cameras has a dark side. Let me start. I don't know what I want to start. Some police chiefs seem reluctant to talk about feeling like we're being watched all the time from large scale data collection. They're piecing together a dossier on your life to mistaken identity. I'm not knowing what's going on. I'm scared to a rapidly growing list of rogue officers using the system like their own private search engine. You don't get rid of the tool. You hold a person who used the tool. Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman says they're doing just that. In February, M. P. D. Recommended criminal charges against Officer Josue Ayala for using flock to stalk his ex girlfriend. He resigned and was later convicted in July. Prosecutors charged a second Milwaukee cop Detective Tarangi Chapman for doing the same thing. But it's hardly just a Milwaukee problem. Fox six investigators have now identified at least 168 individual officers across the country who have been accused of a using flock data 11 in Wisconsin alone. That abuse is inevitable. And Jay Stanley says those are just the ones we know about. But we don't really know how big the iceberg is below the waterline. He's a policy analyst for the A. C. L. U. Which had been writing warnings about blocks, creepy cameras for years, a message that suddenly seems to be landing. I mean, this has been a remarkable public uprising. The outcry against flock has some agencies promising stricter controls. You have to tighten up that circle of who have access while others are cutting ties all together. I think it's kind of gone away from what its intention was. Kenosha Alderman Art DeBeer says no one in the city of Kenosha has been caught misusing the system, but he's aware of the optics. The bad press we're getting here we're hearing about with flock with the abuses in place. It hasn't hit Kenosha City, but we just want to move away from that. Thought it was time to move on to something maybe with less controversy, less trouble. Correct. That shift started in January when the city signed a long term contract with one of flocks cheap competitors. We are maximizing the savings to the city. Axon already provides the police department's body cameras, tasers and cloud based evidence system introducing now that catalog is expanding axon outposts like flock outpost is a fixed pole plate reading system with a twist. We also give you a LPR and live video in one unit. Now Kenosha is in the process of replacing its 31 flock cameras with 31 outpost cameras. So it's not going anywhere. A. L. P. R. S. Are not going anywhere. Harry Morgans is CEO of Privacy be a personal data removal service not far from flocks Atlanta headquarters. It's not about a company. It's about mass surveillance and that surveillance apparatus is being designed and built in many cases without your input. Kenosha signed its new axon contract eight months ago. Still, no one has mentioned outpost in a single public meeting. Should your police chief be talking about this? So taxpayers in Kenosha know what's going on that you would have to ask him. I tried. I just want to have a conversation with you. But at first, Kenosha Police Chief Patrick Patton wanted nothing to do with me. All right, your ground station proceeding. I already told you what I had to tell you. This is the end of this interview. Thank you, sir. I understand you have been trying to ambush a lot of no, no, no. I've been trying to sit down and do an interview. I've been contacted by her chief not to talk to you and I have no because because I don't know accountable. Eventually, he invited me into his office. We understand the concern with surveillance and he told Kenosha lost confidence in flock after the company tried to sell traffic analytics data to the city of Sheboygan in March data, he says he and other Wisconsin police chiefs did not know those cameras were capturing. Trust is eroded and we have to then sell that trust that we have with a vendor to the community and that's eroded. I can't maintain the trust I need to have, he says. Axon offers better security and better control over its data with inter agency sharing turned off by default and we know this tool is effective. Patton says he's trying to balance privacy and public safety. What we're trying to do is find a sweet spot with Axon's ever expanding tech library. Stanley fears it is trying to become the operating system of your local police department. Community should beware of putting a private for profit company at the heart of a police department like that. Morgans is worried about what comes next. At what point do we cross that line? Consider Axon's newest A. L. P. R. Offering axon light post which turns the lights already on your street into full fledged tools of government surveillance. Now streetlights can do more than light the street, they can protect it. Now this is starting to feel very Orwellian. This is very 1984 Patton says Kenosha is not quite ready for that. It seems like a very good technology. But right now we didn't want to make that jump. The question is, is this the power we want them to have? Are you whether it is flock or axon, Kenosha police say they have already have rules in place to prevent officer misuse of license plate data. That includes a requirement that every search be associated with a case number and that officers on routine patrol cannot search the data without prior approval from a supervisor. Flock is taking a lot of heat lately, not just here in Wisconsin and other states like florida. Well, what is the company saying? How is it defending himself? Well, I wanted to get an interview with someone from flock safety when I first did a story in 2023 Garrett Langley, a founder of the company talked to me. Not this time. I couldn't get him to do an interview, but a spokesperson pointed me to a page on their website and it explains that traffic analytics is a new product they just released last year that uses existing flock cameras already in a community to record traffic volumes and speed patterns. But flock says it only uses aggregate statistical data that has been separated from individual vehicle records like license plates. So unlike the plate data, which is routinely deleted after seven or 30 days, depending on your local departments policy, flock keeps the traffic data for five years and offers to sell it back to the city for transportation planning. It seems like that's what really upset some of these chiefs. They felt like that was a breach of trust as we're hearing more concerns voice. We're realizing how many cameras are out there more than 120,000 just from flock alone. And the question really here is, will axon be any different? Even the Kenosha police chief said, we might be in the same boat in a few years. We don't know right now. They think the data is protected better through them and they're going that route and they know what questions to ask. Do you offer this, this and this and you're not telling us about it, you know, give us everything up front and if you're not telling us everything, it's gonna go the same way. Cancel it the same way. All right, Brian Paulson. Great work as always. Thank you. Thanks.