Republic file photo An example of a license plate camera image from Flock Safety showing the rear and side the vehicle, which would also identify any bumper stickers or roof racks.
Bartholomew County has agreed to purchase five additional Flock cameras that use artificial intelligence to read and record license plate numbers of vehicles moving along major local highways.
The decision to invest $27,400 into the five cameras comes 10 months after the Columbus Police Department began testing eight of the high-tech license plate readers. While CPD initially purchased only four of the cameras after the tests concluded in March, spokesman Lt. Matt Harris said his department intends to purchase six more cameras in the near future.
Made by the Atlanta, Georgia-based Flock Safety Company, the devices are capable of capturing still images of every vehicle within its view – even if it’s moving 100 miles per hour day or night, the company states. The images are uploaded to a cloud server, and police are alerted when a vehicle or car owner has been flagged for suspected illegal activity. The cameras are also configured to alert officers to vehicles associated with a missing person.
Funds for the purchase will come from drug forfeiture money, according to Capt. Chris Roberts, commander of the Detectives Bureau of the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department. However, the new contract with Flock Safety will only be valid if the company agrees to not place an automatic renewal on the agreement, the county commissioners said Monday.
To date, the cameras have given local officers information that have enabled them to make quite a few drug arrests, recover stolen vehicles and apprehend those being sought on arrest warrants, Roberts said.
The most recent arrest made possible by a camera took place Sept. 25, when deputies apprehended an Indianapolis man driving a stolen 2011 Ford E450 U-Haul truck traveling south on U.S. 31, Roberts said. Joseph Mark Harshbarger, 37, is charged with auto theft and resisting law enforcement, both Level 6 felonies, as well as a misdemeanor charge of driving while suspended with a prior conviction.
To counter public concern over privacy, local authorities have also emphasized what Flock cameras won’t do. They cannot be set up to judge speed or look for expired plates, county Commissioner Tony London said. Law enforcement will only use a license plate number from Flock if a car or truck has been reported stolen, the owner is wanted on a criminal warrant, or if the vehicle is believed to be involved in a Silver or Amber alert, Roberts said.
The cameras also do not capture images of the vehicle’s occupants, while all data and photos is permanently deleted after 30 days. And since the systems is not considered infallible, officers don’t take the alerts at face value and conduct an investigation to verify the information before taking action, Roberts said in an earlier interview.
Despite those assurances, the cameras continue to spark controversy, London said. For example, privacy rights groups that include the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have characterized the technology as a form of mass surveillance and have expressed concern that the cameras track vehicles whether they have been flagged by police or not. The groups also maintain that the technology has the potential to be abused.
To reduce the possibility of vandalism to the high-tech equipment, city and county officials has requested that exact locations of the cameras not be made public. But it has been reported that some of the earlier cameras covered various points where southbound traffic was coming into Columbus. There were also two cameras focused on eastbound traffic heading toward Greensburg, while another camera records license plates of northbound traffic moving out of German Township.
Some of the new cameras will be looking at traffic heading from Bartholomew into Jennings County, as well as northbound vehicles coming up from Jackson County.
Flock Safety claims that its cameras operate in more than 1,500 U.S. cities. In addition to the Flock cameras, an additional investment of $12,986 was approved Monday to purchase two mobile high-tech cameras manufactured by I2c Technologies of North Canton, Ohio. Once again, drug forfeiture money is financing the purchase, Roberts said.
