Winnetka trustees hear report on license-plate cameras, including potential policy updates

During the Winnetka Village Council meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 6, trustees tackled a big-ticket question on the mind of many nationwide.

Police Chief Brian O’Connell kicked off the meeting with a presentation that pulled back the curtain on the village’s seven license-plate readers. 

As part of his presentation detailing the updates to the police department’s automated license plate readers policy, O’Connell offered a behind-the-scenes look into the software, with images showing a police officer’s point of view when utilizing the software. 

Use Cases

Winnetka is contracted with Flock Safety, the company that designs and manufactures the license-plate cameras and hardware that have been deployed throughout Winnetka for the purposes of helping maintain public safety and assisting in criminal investigations.

The cameras themselves remain Flock’s property, but Winnetka owns the data captured by the cameras. 

“The Winnetka Police Department uses ALPR technology to convert data associated with vehicle license plates for official law enforcement purposes, including identifying stolen or wanted vehicles, stolen license plates, and missing persons,” the Village of Winnetka website explains.

Triggered by motion, these cameras photograph license plates in real-time. They capture the license plate number, exact date and time at which the image is snapped, GPS location of the camera, and vehicle make, model and color. Vehicle registration information is not collected.

A plate that matches that of a car that has been stolen, for example, is automatically pushed to alert officers, often within seconds.

From Jan. 1 to Sept. 16, Winnetka logged 55 cases in which Flock was used in an investigation. These instances reportedly included misdemeanors, felonies and seven well-being assists for missing elderly and at-risk people (of which five were located with the help of the cameras). 

ALPR technology assisted the Winnetka Police Department in locating the primary suspect vehicle and identifying a secondary vehicle, from which eight total people were arrested, in connection to the armed home invasion in Winnetka on March 8.

“I remember being able to provide information quickly to our community that these offending people were likely out of our community,” O’Connell said. “We could validate that in real-time — that they left. If I didn’t have this, and I’m just going to be honest here, I would have held this community in some sort of lockdown for several hours until we were quite confident that these offenders left our community because they were armed and extremely dangerous.”

Flock Capabilities

In June 2022, Winnetka trustees approved the purchase of the village’s first two such cameras, as The Record reported; however, the trustees called for a more stringent policy about how the cameras’ data could be used. 

Fast forward to Oct. 6, and the village continues to tighten its policies surrounding its now seven ALPR cameras, which are each on a two-year contract. O’Connell addressed ongoing privacy concerns throughout his presentation and announced the launch of a transparency portal.

He began by rejecting the notion that Flock cameras are surveilling private residences and private property.

“These are fixed cameras taking images of vehicles and license plates on the public roadway, at the very moment that vehicle passes,” O’Connell said. “It does not provide a video recording.”

To prove that images of private property are not being taken, O’Connell displayed three images showing the aerial view, street view, and camera reads from each of the seven locations. 

In his “camera read” image examples, one of the Winnetka Police Department vehicles is seen with its license plate information captured by Flock. Most of the vehicle and only a portion of the roadway directly in front of it are visible.

Among the Flock safeguards, O’Connell noted that the encrypted data is saved to a secure cloud infrastructure.

O’Connell also shared a redacted, internal deletion verification document that Flock provided to the Winnetka Police Department, demonstrating that the company deletes the data on a 30-day rolling basis.

Proposed Policy Changes

The proposed updates to the Village’s ASPR policy include a seven-day rolling data purge, significantly less than the 30-day timeline.“Evidence mode” reportedly can be activated to preserve data in ongoing investigations.

Among other changes to tighten the language and add specificity, the update adjusts the alert verification process from “LEADS check ‘if practicable’” to “LEADS check required.” LEADS is the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System. 

Although O’Connell praised the advancements in technology, he recognized it is not foolproof and that officers do not or should not make traffic stops based on Flock alone. They must, he said, verify any alert through direct observations and checking LEADS.

“This has been one of the most advanced law enforcement tools in my 25 years in law enforcement, but no technology is perfect,” O’Connell said. “There are false hits. It happens. Our police department knows that an alert is not a trigger for probable cause. It is considered a ‘lead.’”

O’Connell addressed a recent, heavily publicized incident during which Brookfield Police officers in Wisconsin pulled over an innocent driver and her passenger at gunpoint. An ALPR system flagged Newell’s vehicle due to an outdated Flock camera alert that the Milwaukee Police Department had failed to remove. 

Additionally, improper uses of Flock data have also generated national headlines.

“I feel that, not everything, but a lot of what we’re seeing in the media right now are bad apples in law enforcement, and I stand here as chief saying that, and it’s disheartening because we all try to do this job for the right reasons, but there is official misconduct going on,” he said. “This is not unique to Flock. When LEADS came out 60 years ago law enforcement officers were abusing that as well.

“What happened as a result of that? Stronger policy, more restrictions, supervisors looking over the day-in and day-out operations. That happened back then. It’s happening now with Flock.”

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