WILL Sues 11 Waukesha County Communities Over Flock Cameras

A Flock Safety automated license plate reading camera. Photo by Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Municipalities in Waukesha County are facing a lawsuit over their use of Flock Safety’s license plate reader camera system.

The conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, or WILL, filed the suit, arguing law enforcement members in the municipalities are using the camera database system without a search warrant, violating the Fourth Amendment.

The suit was filed Thursday in Waukesha County Circuit Court against the City of Muskego, City of Oconomowoc, City of New Berlin, Village of Mukwonago, City of Waukesha, City of Delafield, Village of Hartland, City of Brookfield, Village of Menomonee Falls, Village of Elm Grove and Village of Pewaukee, as well as Waukesha County.

Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel for WILL, said they are asking the court to declare that law enforcement in the county must obtain a search warrant before they use the Flock system.

“And that a warrant is required under the U.S. Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment, to search this database, which is a really powerful database that tracks your daily movements, just like a lot of other technologies do,” Lennington said.

Data from the cameras can be accessed by other law enforcement agencies.

Lennington said there are examples of misuse of the technology by police officers in Wisconsin and across the nation.

“If there just would have been some sort of oversight, like a warrant requirement from a judge, then these abuses would have been caught,” he said.

“That’s really the purpose of the Fourth Amendment, is to provide a check on law enforcement and to make sure that when they’re using very powerful surveillance tools, like Flock cameras, that those requests are reviewed before they’re put in the field,” he added.

The lawsuit comes as some local governments and law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin have moved to cut ties with Flock Safety. Opponents of the technology have raised privacy concerns and worries about how the data can be accessed and shared.

Some local leaders have said the technology is a tool that can be used to improve public safety.

Lennington said WILL is not asking that the municipalities cancel contracts with Flock Safety.

“We’re not asking that the cameras be taken down,” he said. “We’re asking that the constitutional standard be applied.”

What the complaint says

There are more than 120 Flock cameras installed in Waukesha County, according to the complaint. The complaint says the 11 municipalities named in the lawsuit, and Waukesha County, all have contracts with Flock Safety.

The municipalities and the county have, “granted police officers permission to search a surveillance network that records, tracks, and predicts the whole of Plaintiffs’ physical movements,” the complaint said.

“This permission — searching the whole of Plaintiffs’ past, present, and future physical movements without a warrant or probable cause — violates the Fourth Amendment’s right to be free from unreasonable searches,” the complaint said.

The complaint said the Flock database, or the “Flock Location Database,” has photos and videos from the cameras in Waukesha County, as well as from more than 1,500 Flock cameras across the state and around 120,000 Flock cameras across the nation.

The complaint said the local governments, “allow their employees (typically police officers) to search the Flock Location Database and use Flock’s advanced tools without obtaining a warrant.”

“Defendants also do not require probable cause before searching the Flock Location Database or to use Flock’s advanced tools,” the complaint said.

The complaint claims movements “are tracked and recorded in this database.” It said the cameras record the location of a vehicle and the time, as well as details like the vehicle’s make and model.

The lawsuit alleges the database is a “database of individuals’ physical location information,” and therefore, “the Fourth Amendment demands a warrant based on probable cause before any search (or a valid exception),” the complaint said.

Lennington said a valid exception could include an “emergency exception.”

In Muskego, police officers searched the Flock database over 300 times from July 25 and Aug. 24, according to the complaint. Muskego has 9 Flock cameras, the complaint says.

“Other agencies ran searches on the Flock Location Database that included the City of Muskego cameras over 900,000 times during the same period,” the complaint said.

NoCams Muskego is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Pete Karas, who is running for Wisconsin Secretary of State as a member of the Green Party, is the group’s co-founder. He agrees that a warrant should be required in order to use the database.

“If the government wants to search your cell phone, they need to get a warrant, or your Google history, they need a warrant,” Karas said. “But in this case, they can monitor and track you, and no warrant is needed.”

Municipalities in Waukesha County sued over use of Flock camera system  was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.