Quincy City Council: October 6, 2026

Thank you.

Good evening, I would like to call this public hearing for Tuesday October 6th 2026 at 6 p.m. To order a public hearing of the Quincy City Council Oversight Committee. The public hearing tonight concerns council order 2026104 regarding the city of Quincy's use of flock technology Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming out tonight to share your concerns, express your support and participate in these important discussions We welcome different perspectives, and I ask that everyone treat our speakers and guests and one another with respect. I want to thank the Quincy Police Department for everything its officers and staff do every day for the citizens of Quincy. We appreciate their service and their dedication to keeping our community safe. Tonight's hearing is to give residents and counselors an opportunity to better understand flock cameras in their use in Quincy, and questions surrounding them.

I also want to recognize the Chief of Police, Mark Kennedy for inviting counselors to the police headquarters to meet with him and members of his command staff Captain Ward and Lieutenant Flaherty. to demonstrate how the flock system works in an effort to provide full transparency. The residents of Quincy are well served by our Chief and I believe he has made of many efforts to protect our residents' civil liberties while maximizing their safety. Before I begin, I want to explain how tonight's hearing will proceed. Tonight's purpose is to listen, gather information and ask questions. We will not be taking any motions on the flock order tonight. A vote to extend the public hearing will concern only if time allotted for the public testimony. So it's 45 minutes, if we need more than 45 minutes we'll take a vote for another 15 minutes

and if we need to go over that 15 minutes, we'll pause the public hearing. We'll go into speaking with our guests and then at the end of that we'll go back into the public hearings. Anyone wishing to speak in favor or an opposition to this order should sign in on the sheet at the back, which is out there. It's out there. There are two sheets, one is if you just want to sign in that you support or don't support it and the other one is a sign-in sheet for if you want to speak. When your name is called, please come to the podium and state your name and address for the record. If you do not wish to speak again but would like to show your opposition and record, please indicate that on the sheet, again outside at the back of the chamber All remarks must relate directly to FLOC. So this is not like open forum during the city council meetings, this is a public hearing just on FLOCC and that's what we're talking about.

You have three minutes, so when your three minutes have expired please conclude your remarks so that the next resident can speak. This will help give everyone a fair opportunity to be heard. at the end of the initial 45 minutes, if additional time is needed I'll ask the council to vote to extend for 15 minutes as I said before. If everyone wishing to speak has been heard we will close the public hearing If residents are still waiting to speak, we will recess the public hearing and open the oversight committee meeting to hear from our invited guests. Each guest will have approximately 10 to 15 minutes to present. After their presentations, counselors will have an opportunity to ask them questions. Many of those questions are the questions that we collected during the last two weeks waiting for this public hearing to commence. Once that question and answer period concludes,

we will reconvene the public hearing, if necessary to hear from residents who may still be waiting to speak. When everyone wishing to speak has been heard we will close the public hearing once the committee's discussion is complete and we'll adjourn. And again, I just wanna thank you for coming out tonight and just remind everyone to be thoughtful, respectful and productive because this will allow us to go a little bit faster. One other thing I want to do is during open forum, a lot of times a person talks, sits down and then we call the other person. Anyone who played baseball when they were younger you know there's always being on deck so we have a list of speakers I'm going to hopefully have two or three people in line just so that way we can kind of move people along, so we don't have as much downtime. Also before we begin, I want to just do some introductions. Just so everyone knows who everybody is and that includes our guests.

So we'll actually start with our guest. We have Chief of Police Mark Kennedy and who's right there, we have Captain Ward and Lieutenant Flaherty. We also have, I don't know if he's here yet, our District Attorney Michael Morrissey is also going to be here but I don' think he's just here just yet We have Gideon Epstein, Policy Counsel at the ACLU. We have Matthew Ross, Professor of Economics at Northeastern University We have Brian Hurley, a Quincy resident and systems engineer. And we have Maxfield Capron? Capron, thank you. A Quincy resident who's representing a local civic group of raising awareness of flock. I also want to take just a few minutes to introduce the city council members, just because there may be people in the audience who aren't regular attendees here and may not know They're city councilors.

So we have Virginia Ryan, she's the Ward 4 City Councilor. If you live in West Quincy, she is your ward councillor. Southwest Quincy Brewers Corner Over there we have Ward 2 Councilor Richard Ash. He represents Quincy Point, Penns Hill, part of Quincy Center Faxon Park, thank you. So if you were living in that area he's your representative we have Councilor at large Susan Yuan represents the whole city We have Ward 6 City Councilor Deborah Riley who represents North Quincy, Atlantic, Squantum, Marina Bay. We have the Mayor's Chief of Staff here as a representative on the council to represent the mayor We have the Clerk of Committee here, Jen Manning. I'm David Jacobs. I am the Ward 1 City Councilor. I represent Adam Shore, Germantown, Howes Neck, Marymount, Post Island Part of Quincy Center and part of Quincey Point.

We have Councilor, Council President Anne Mahoney. She's councilor at large. And we have Ward 3 City Councilor Walter Hubley who represents Wollaston Hill, parts of Wolliston, Montclair in parts of North Quincy? A little bit of West Quincy. I know the lines are a little funky in there, but when we are comprised, we make up the city council and we have some other city councillors who aren't here yet, but they will be joining us. With that in mind, I'm going to start the hearing. So we have Andrew, Carlene, John Fitzmaurice and Mark Koch. So if you guys can stand up in that order. Yeah, is the podium on? Go ahead, Mr. Carlene.

Andrew Carlene, 63 Brook Road. Good evening, Councilors and thank you for the time. I'm speaking tonight as a father, as a veteran, and a proud resident of Quincy I'm eager to hear from Chief Kennedy and the experts here, to get a little bit more information tonight. I would love to stand here and speak legalistically about privacy rights and how the Fourth Amendment should be applied in the digital age but such a tone would not be worthy of the moment. It's not my nature to be an angry person, but I wake up angry every single day angry at a federal administration that sends masked secret police with a budget larger than the US Marine Corps into towns and cities across this country to terrorize communities. angry at a bloodless, taxpayer-funded network of private prisons responsible for the deaths of perhaps as many as 60 detainees in its custody in the past two years.

These are the things we were taught in school lay behind the iron curtain in the Cold War. These are facts that profane the service of those of us who put on a uniform and took an oath in good faith to uphold our Constitution. we have learned not from due diligence on the part of the city but from public records requests that our system here in Quincy has been queried by CBP for immigration enforcement. We have learned that it's been used to surveil First Amendment protected demonstrations such as No King's Rallies, we have learned that our city has been perhaps unwittingly collaborating in a national authoritarian project without the knowledge or consent of the residents. The mayor has spoken about the efficacy of this system for solving crimes, but refuses to engage on the substance of concerns that we now know were not hypothetical.

If the mayor has no problem with our city aiding and abetting the Trump administration's domestic agenda, I would prefer he state that plainly instead of obfuscating and hiding behind ALPR industry talking points. If that's the debate he wants to have So be it. And he can also explain how to square that position with the Protect Act, a state law that prohibits the use of law enforcement resources in the Commonwealth for federal immigration enforcement It has been less than a month since this topic was last before the City Council. And in that time, over a dozen additional towns and municipalities in Massachusetts have stopped using Flock Our mayor describes this issue as overblown, but this is an issue of the rights and safety of our neighbors. This is an issues of the kind of community Quincy wants to be This is an issue that I think the mayor would prefer just go away.

It's not going to go away, Mayor Koch, until the flock cameras do. Thank you for your time.

Very good. John Fitzmaurice?

JOHN FITZMAURICE, Nine Calvin Road in Quincy. As the Senior Director of an Information Technology Department at a biotech company for 25 years. I led campus surveillance systems, building access network security, database management and computer systems validation. I also managed the campus security staff I retired three years ago. I'm here to speak about my experience with surveillance systems and what I have learned about the Flock ALPR network I designed and managed four closed video surveillance systems with more than 50 cameras on two campuses. This is comparable to the size of Quincy Police Department's current flock surveillance network There are, however, significant differences between my company's surveillance systems and Flock ALPR system. The systems I designed and managed were truly closed all of the company's cameras were wired back to our data centers.

None of the cameras were wireless They were on a separate network, not connected to any other internal networks at our business and certainly not connected the internet. No one except a small group of IT staff had access to storage surveillance data. Systems Management and Operations were managed by standard operating procedures that I wrote and validated. Flock ALPR's network is not truly closed, despite what we hear. The AOPRs are wireless, and many of them are vulnerable to a hack. They're connected to the Flock Cloud via cell phone network all ALPR data is sent back to the Flock Cloud and stored on Amazon Web Services Network. So what is the cloud? Simply put, it's someone else's computer. That's what I tell everybody. It's just someone else has a computer system

companies and agencies like Quincy Police Department rent space on their, and use their software and Computing Power on Flux and Amazon's remote computers on the internet. The cloud is like a hotel, the guests are given a room to use the amenities in this case the amenities of software and keep their personal belongings data in that room. We're all aware that when we exit a hotel room, the room is not secure from hotel management maintenance and housekeeping access You have to trust the hotel staff to not mismanage, misuse, disturb or share your personal belongings. Likewise, you must trust that Flock and Amazon Web Services will not mismanage misuse disturb or share your data. Flock has broken that trust in the past

The Boston Police Department discovered that despite Flock's assurances the data from its pilot program would not be shared with any other client, Flock shared them with every other client.

Thank you. I'm sorry, your three minutes is up. Okay, thank you. We have Mark Koch is next, followed by Bill Zamzow and then Tyler Anderson just to keep things moving. Mr. Koch?

Thank you. My name is Mark Koch, 42 years old. I live at 115 Colby Road. My dad was a city councilor in the 80s. He's now a retired chief of police on Cape Cod where he was a police officer for over 30 years. I'm the only lawyer in my family, so this is obviously a discussion where we're speaking and we're gonna get questions later and I feel like I have a lot to say. What is overblown, is the amount of flock cameras we have in this city. These are not license plate readers they collect data what they are is constant warrantless surveillance of citizens. We are in a city where police officers don't have body-worn cameras, why? We're in the city where we have cameras pointed at civilians instead, why We're in a city where there's 50 some odd flock cameras and today is the first time.

Thank you to the City Council for making an event like this happen, where we can speak and where we can say why did all these cameras go up with seemingly no oversight? Who decided that for us? Is it the police's decision to police us, and who is policing them? Now, I can say I'm biased because I'm a criminal defense attorney. I do court appointed work in juvenile court so I don't think it's all that dramatic but at the same time this is and as far as lawyers go, this is not legal advice for the record There's a 2020 case, Commonwealth v. McCarthy. It's 48 mass 493 if anybody wants to go look it up and what our highest court said is that there were four cameras that were used to track this alleged criminal, he was convicted. He appealed it and they said no we're gonna uphold this.

However if the surveillance was more, I forget the exact terminology and I apologize but essentially We're beyond that in Quincy. So when the police tell you tonight that they need flock cameras to catch criminals, play that forward. What happens when that case goes to court? what happens when it's a very, very serious case? If they actually did need the flock cameras then what's gonna happen is very well it could just be dismissed. Not because the person's innocent not because of the victim did anything wrong but because we have too many cameras and that means the case is gonna go away. I don't know who the attorney is for the police department, and I know who's the attorney for the city, but I think that's very important. And if they don't need flock cameras or in those cases, the alternative is you argue inevitable discovery. We would have found that out anyways so that case doesn't go away.

The police would've found it out anyway so the case isn't dismissed. Follow that through. if it's inevitable discovery. That means the Quincy police can do their job without flock cameras, and by using 50 flock cameras or 40 or 30 or 20, it's gonna lead to a case being dismissed. Thank you.

Bill Zamzow, Jared Kazut. You could come up and stand to move the line along.

Good evening, Bill Zamzao, 46 Tilded Circle, Quincy. Councilors as well as all others taking in this hearing please take note of the following Quincy Police Chief Kennedy deserves some to considerable slack. Flock was rolled out in Quincy by his predecessor and who is one of the mayor's brothers-in-law, as well as Shirley with the Mayor's blessing but apparently without the council's direct in formal approval and most definitely not without any public input. As such, unless some years ago now Chief Kennedy was part of bringing Quincy to flock via an ad hoc or some other sort of committee He has been tapped to take hits as the designated flag catcher for the Koch administration. Moving along, media reports have it that dozens of Massachusetts communities have cut their ties with flock, with most terminations apparently for cause on top of pushback by outraged locals.

Conversely, reports of contracts terminated with Flock's competitors are few and far between as far as I can tell. As such what does the administration have in the way of justification to keep Flock? For example As for performance and use metrics justifications, I saw a chart that listed a solid six figure monthly tapping of flock camera data in total by outsiders. Five-figure taps by in-state agencies, much less by local police and even fewer inquiries citing a case number with even fewer yet noted as tied to successfully closed cases. Granted This big number to small numbers winnowing might be justifiable somehow or other. However, at first blush I had my doubts. In short, while FLOC offers benefits they are limited as well as mostly to provide after the fact support as opposed to more consequential crime fighting.

In turn, it's thus only fair to address what is the cost of personal privacy as well as the financial costs to pay for FLOC. Oh, and speaking of financial costs, there are clear indications that some of the funds expended to bring Flock to Quincy were improperly tapped funds. Simply put, what the flock? In closing, I thus look forward to seeing the Council follow the money. Thank you for your consideration.

Tyler and Elizabeth Dietrich, you're on deck.

Tyler Anderson, I'm from Ward 4, Rissiuti Drive. I'm here speaking in my capacity as a private citizen of Quincy. I am a policy analyst for stop killing games and stop killing the internet, so you're probably aware of which side of this issue I'm on I was at the last meeting, and I thought a lot about what I wanted to say. for the sake of everybody's sanity, I'm gonna be as succinct as I possibly can. I'm going to speak about one man and two documents. The man is John Adams and given where we are, I should hope you know who that is He's buried about 200 feet behind me. And the two documents I want to talk about are both spawned from his brain. So John Adams felt very strongly about unreasonable search and seizure,

He wrote specifically that the child independence was born during James Otis's arguments against unreasonable search and seizure in the then British courts. He never really stopped having those feelings, because he wrote a few years later after we won the revolution Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights which specifically bans unreasonable search and seizure houses, possessions and persons. And then a little bit later we have the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution which draws directly from Article 14 of the Massachusetts State Declaration of Rights He was very proud of these documents. And we are very proud John Adams, which you might know by the fact that his name is plastered over literally everything in this city

But if I go a block that way to Adams Academy, there are seven cameras pointed at that thing. If I go 30 steps that way, we have two of these flock cameras pointed at his grave. I don't think We need to talk a lot about the details. I could talk about how, I think Chief Kennedy's professional. I don't think he wants to give up a tool he finds useful but there is no deal to be made with these people they have violated every agreement they've had. They go into cities that have canceled their contracts and they put up new ones, they collect more data than they say they do. This is not complicated This is mass surveillance.

There will never be, God willing, a clearer example of this in our entire lifetime. We love John Adams so let's stop pissing on his grave

Jeremiah Monk is on deck, and Jared, you're up.

Thank you, my name is Jared. I live in Ward 3 on Holbrook Road next to the school. This is my first city council meeting. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak I've lived in Quincy for nine years now and I've been a truck driver for all that time. I didn't prepare anything, so I'm going to stutter a little bit. But I wanted to talk about a little personal experience I've had with a similar technology I'm sure everyone has heard about how self-driving trucks are around the corner. Well, AI has definitely come to the trucking industry but not in that form it's cameras that watch the driver and I've worked for several companies now with these cameras that are AI enabled, and they send video clips to my boss of

when my eyes stray from the road for a few seconds or when I take a hand off the steering wheel. And I'm sure these, Little videos make my boss's safety officer and his job very easy, but they also just enable abuse. they give bad people a lot of power. And I think a lot people tonight, I don't want you to get confused think that everyone here talking against Flock necessarily thinks the police are bad people. That's not the case, but I want everyone to imagine just like the founders did, just like John Adams did

A hypothetical future where the person in charge, the person reviewing the footage isn't an upstanding gentleman like we have today. I want to personally express support for a bill that would limit the expansion of this technology license plate readers in general, not just flock but all this technology in general. Thank you.

Francis Thompson, you're on deck.

Hi my name is Elizabeth Dietrich I'm at 95 West Quantum Street. I'm here today to object the use of flock cameras in Quincy like so many The last time we were gathered here to discuss flock cameras, Chief Kennedy called flock another tool in the toolbox of Quincy PD. And so you would feel terrible regret if forgoing the use of flock cameras meant that a crime wasn't solved or there was a delay in bringing justice to the victims. I can understand that, I completely can put myself in his shoes there. But today, I'd like to pose the flip side of that hypothetical. What happens if Quincy's flock cameras which have such such reach and are able to capture so much of our city. What happens if those cameras get hacked, and used to commit a crime rather than to solve one? Not just the federal agency queries, I'm not talking about that.

Or even queries by someone in Flock. Actual hackers! We know these cameras are not secure cybersecurity experts have raised red flags about this for months. And over and over it's been proven that Flock itself does not really care about the security of the data that is coming out of their cameras. Criminals could use flocked data to stalk Quincy citizens, to monitor them as they're coming and going from their homes maybe even to blackmail them What kind of regrets would we have as a community if a tool that Quincy PD intends to use for good is instead used for evil? These are all just hypotheticals, for now. Let's please not wait to see if they become reality and keep Quincy free of Flock and other license plate readers. Thank you.

So Alan Nelson, you're on deck. You want to get in line?

Hi I'm Jeremiah Monk. I also live at 95 West Quantum Street. I work in building operations. So in the world we live in, in 2026 cybersecurity slows down hacks and breaches but it never works forever. Everything gets leaked eventually right? A company with a network the size of Flock that interfaces with so many police departments across the country is never going to be able to secure all its cameras forever. They have been hacked before, they will be hacked again. So we aren't just building cameras that provide law enforcement with the ability to monitor us. We're providing criminals the ability We are also providing that ability to any foreign country that wishes to. Any national intelligence service could hack these cameras, and I have nothing but goodwill for every country in the world, but I can think of maybe a couple

I wouldn't want monitoring me whenever I'm in public. Non-state actors could hack these cameras. We live in a world where today hacked cameras are used to target drone strikes in conflict zones, I hate to be the guy who brings this up, but yeah a terrorist on the other side of the planet could use these cameras to kill someone here. Now pray to God that never happens right? That Quincy never attracts that kind of attention why should we pay to build this weapon against ourselves? This is something that we should be willing to pay to not have pointed at us, right. Now I think it's been pretty clear basically everyone who lives in Quincy is opposed to these flock cameras except for the police department. And I respect that on public safety, The opinion of the police department is valuable, should be listened to.

But I would also ask, you know, I'm very lucky that my job is not as dangerous as working in law enforcement What happens when a criminal with the grudge uses a flock camera to track an officer or their loved ones? Does that make us safer or more dangerous? If we really need more tools, let's use this money and hire another detective. I think that would be safer for everyone who lives here. Thank you.

Elizabeth Dreher, you're on deck.

Francis Thompson, 53 West Elm. As many people have spoken eloquently about the risks of flock hammer misusage I will try to stick to the following topics motivation effectiveness and externalities What kind of city do we want to be? Do we want create a city where its citizens feel surveilled, monitored, stocked, databased or do we build a city in which its citizens have no fear of panoptic control and are able to express themselves freely and openly. Well, we invest in matters and it will matter for a long time. Currently, we are choosing to invest in the lonely cold mechanized police state of our future. In today's atomized world, we should be encouraging freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom Mass surveillance systems inhibit these freedoms. A recent study by Oxford University scholar John Penny found that in 2013, when US citizens became aware of the online surveillance perpetrated by the NSA a decrease of at least 15% was observed in online searches for potentially embarrassing queries.

The research term for these decreases and activity due to surveillance is called chilling, and it is clear that the real world effects of flock surveillance holds the risk of even greater chilling in real life. Simply put, people feel less comfortable practicing their constitutionally given freedoms if they're being watched. This has been observed empirically. Another under-discussed aspect of this is effectiveness. What safety are we supposedly gaining by forgoing our constitutional freedoms? It's increasingly clear the answer is not much, London is considered by most scholars to be the most surveilled city in the entire world with over 10 cameras per person. In Quincy, that rate would be an amount of 10,000 plus flock cameras. Even with that wide of a net violent crime in London is about 21 cases per capita compared to 3.3 cases per capital in Quincy a seven time increase. Meanwhile, Boston has zero flock cameras following security breach aforementioned. Quincy is significantly safer than Boston on violent crime level which is significantly safe within the national average. Why should we give up our civil liberties for safety concerns that are largely unfounded.

Lastly, I'd like to discuss what externalities I think are underappreciated and underdiscussed. Flock is an AI company. While AI has attracted a lot of oohs and ahhs as well as trillions of dollars in capital expenditure, AI's number one product is carbon dioxide is an arguably the most polluting technology in human history. The data flock unconstitutionally collects on US citizens' house by Amazon Web Services, which is currently in court over a data center in Texas, which has set to produce 33.3% 33 million tons of carbon dioxide yearly, equivalent to seven large oil fields. That is one data center. Extrapolate that over the roughly 5,000 active data centers in the United States and there's over 178 billion tons of carbon dioxide released yearly. That's over three times the amount of carbon-dioxide release in Exxon Mobil's entirety For Quincy to in one breath sing its own praises for its so-called commitment to climate protection, and another breath employ a tool with calamitous effects on said environment shows gross hypocrisy. The matter is not about trusting Quincy police. I think Quincy Police's attitude on the matter reflects a dangerous arrogance which has been proven to be misplaced. The city of Boston cannot prevent data breaches.

Amazon, the fifth largest company in the world with a market cap equivalent to the size of France could not prevent data breeches. Flock itself could not. What makes Quincy Police so sure they can prevent?

Hi, thank you City Council for holding this hearing. I'm Elin Nelson. I live at 28 Village Drive. I also would like to express my serious concern regarding the flock safety cameras These cameras passively record and track the movement of every vehicle in person that passes, not just vehicles tied to active criminal investigations but everyday people going about their private lives. This is mass surveillance. And I was very disturbed to learn that flock safety employees have watched kids' gymnastics rooms to pitch surveillance tech. And again, that's not the Quincy Police Department. Those are corporate executives. So imagine corporate employees you've never met watching live feeds of your child's gymnastics class, not for security but to impress potential customers. And that's exactly what happened in Dunwoody, Georgia

where flock safety workers access cameras in children's spaces at the Marcus Jewish Community Center as part of sales demonstrations. I have a two year old daughter and I want her to live in a city where her privacy is protected. Many towns in Massachusetts have already ended their contracts with Flock, I ask our Quincy City government to do the same I urge the Quincy City Council and Mayor Koch to cancel any and all current and future ALPR contracts with Fox Safety, any other companies. Remove the current surveillance cameras and protect the privacy of us Quincy residents. Thank you.

So Elizabeth is going to speak next, but we can have Diego and Carrie Sheehan on deck for the next speakers. Thank you.

ELIZABETH DREHER Thank you, Elizabeth Dreher, 623 Quincy Shore Drive Ward Six Thank you to the council for having this public hearing regarding Quincy's use of flock safety technology. I'm here tonight out of a duty to my neighbors and a sense of deep concern and growing unease, when I see how this country and our city have changed. Technology is evolving faster than it can be governed, and as a result we do not have adequate means of controlling the tools of technology that are now being used by law enforcement. Not only were Quincy residents not given a say prior to the installation of flock cameras across the city, but they are paying for the privilege even as the city's debt continues to grow. I'd like to understand, what about Quincy requires that we have the highest number of flock cameras in the state while other cities and towns continue to cancel their flock contracts from Massachusetts to Florida?

I'm certain that contracts with Flock were signed with the best of intentions. After all, the appeal is baked into the brand, Flock Safety. It's meant to coax us into giving up our privacy in exchange for a vague notion of being safer. This tool and those similar to it are powerful. They're ripe for abuse as hundreds of cases of misuse and abuse continue to surface, and these are only the cases we know about. For individuals who were authorized to use the flock system let alone the instances we don't know about or any unauthorized access which is very easily obtained from online tutorials. The success stories in Quincy that flock safety themselves describes have nothing to do with our safety and focus instead on recovering stolen property and vandalism after the fact.

One aspect of a Flock success story did catch my attention solely because Flock highlighted how well it is able to track someone's movements. I do not want to live in a city where my community members' movements are so easily tracked. what medical care we seek, where we gather who we are connected to our movements should not be captured by a profit driven technology company and sold back to our city as safety. I urge Quincy to cancel its contract with FLOC effective immediately. Thank you, Councillors.

Sue Doherty, you're on deck followed by Heather Doney Is Diego here? And then after Diego is Kerry, then Susan Doherty and then Heather Doney.

All right. Hey, folks and good evening. Good evening. I didn't really prepare a speech. I kind of just threw it together. I'm going to keep this pretty short. This is my work laptop. Part of my job is to prepare and deploy these machines toward users. Now when we deploy them, we tell them hey you can install things that are approved and you can change settings how you'd like. You can do things to make your job easier. What we don't tell them is at any moment IT can access your computer undo those changes and bypass them like this This isn't just true for us, this is true for every IT department in the country. I'd be really surprised if the machines that the councilors are sitting in front of can't have the same things done to them. This is industry standard practice and it's also true for Flock I want to talk about BPD. BPD wrote a contract where they had restrictions in place on who can look at the cameras, they had clauses to ensure that data from Boston stays in Boston

They had clauses to ensure that, you know, everything they did was done correctly. It took three days for Flock to just flick a switch and undo all of their access controls In the same way that big tech loves to come in and flip those settings that you set on your social media or whatever, just turn them off because they felt like it. Flock can do the same, and it's not just Flock. It's any company that builds these cameras. This isn't a oh they might, it's a they've shown they'll do it, and they've showed they'll justify it. QPD has some plans in place to set up restrictions and stuff, and build a really strong door. The thing is though, we can put as many locks on the door as we want. We can restrict who can access this door as much as we wanted. We could build a fortress but we don't own the building. Flock does. Floc can issue keys to whoever they want

They've shown they'll give themselves keys to access our cameras. They've quite frankly done whatever they can. If we write a clause that say you can't go through this door, they will build a new door. This isn't just Flock. Every company like this can and will do the same. I don't just think we should cut our contract with Flock, we should outright ban this technology from Quincy as a whole because let's say we get rid of it through QPD They can work with any private business to mount their camera software on any camera system in the city. And right back to square one. This just shouldn't exist. It goes counter to the very founding ideas of this country, and sometimes a tool just isn't worth the downsides. All right folks have a nice night.

So again, we have Carrie Sheehan next followed by Sue Doherty, Heather Doney and then would be Ethan King.

Hello, Carrie Sheehan, 27 Piermont Street. Thank you to the council for having this hearing. I don't want to be redundant up here. All the points seem pretty valid. I do have children, like probably a lot of you in this room. They like to ride their bikes on the same streets usually around the same time every day so now i feel like i have this extra worry about who is watching them with these cameras and whatnot. and the pushback is always, well if you're not breaking the law you shouldn't be worried but I am worried. I'm very worried that my children's movements can be documented and then a pattern can be made and somebody somewhere has access to it, not just here in Quincy anywhere. And just have tech tied so closely with our government is really only good for the tech company's bottom line, in my opinion. And it's not for the residents no matter what we've been told.

So that's just short and sweet. And thank you.

Thank you. The next person on deck will be Zachary Christopher.

Hi, my name is Sue Daugherty. I live at 922 C Street. So I'm against Flock. Flock and other ALPRs are part of the techno-fascist regime that is being built by tech billionaires and right wing politicians to control all the peasants. That's us. who they see as disposable workers and consumers. What is techno-fascism? Who and what is driving it? For a partial answer to this question, I'm reading with some light editing from the beginning of a post about techno- fascism in L. James Johnson's substack The Jesus Principle What techno-fascism means. Writers and researchers use techno- fascism for a specific pattern, ultra rich tech figures backing authoritarian politics while building the tools to enforce them. Key features keep showing up. Contempt for democracy as inefficient or broken A preference for rule by elites or founders over voters. Investment in surveillance, policing and military tech to manage the population. Culture war politics that target minorities and dissent as threats. This is all part of an anti-democratic project. Peter Thiel is the clearest example.

Thiel co-founded Palantir, the data mining firm that sells tools to the Pentagon, ICE and law enforcement agencies In a 2009 essay he wrote, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. And argued that real freedom lies in new technological frontiers outside democratic control His venture funds have backed companies like Clearview, AI and Flock. He plays in facial recognition and mass surveillance infrastructure. This isn't accidental. Thiel's own writing leans on ideas that say Democracy is decadent and exhausted. Elites must preserve noble lies to justify their rule. A tightly controlled order is preferable to messy pluralism. In other words, the people can't be trusted. The right kind of rulers should quietly run things. the right kind of rulers, building the machinery of control. Palantir software ingests huge amounts of personal data and helps government agencies track map and target individuals in communities

Surveillance firms like Flock sell tools that let police and private clients follow people's movements and identify them on site. Venture money flows into drones, predictive policing, AI driven monitoring and smart city platforms that can easily be repurposed for repression. Research has described this as building the authoritarian stack. Cloud service, AI, sensors, finance, satellites and entire control system owned by private corporations moving faster than any public oversight You don't need a dictator in uniform when you can get the same result from a network of companies that see everything and answer to no one. That's the end of the part I'm reading, I just want to say get Flock and all APRs out of Quincy and this whole system really needs to be taken down and resisted. The drones can target children in Gaza, they can target Children in Quincy I mean it's not...I've read a lot of dystopian fiction

We should not be feeding this anti-democratic authoritarian techno fastest machine with our tax dollars, our data and our people. Thank you

Heather, I'm just going to ask you to wait one minute. We just need to take a brief recess from the public hearing to open the oversight committee and then go back into the public So I'm gonna call to order the October 6th Oversight Committee hearing. I'm going to read the open meeting law, pursuant to the Open Meeting Law Any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting, or may transmit the meeting through any medium. Attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are being made, whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledgeable and permissible. And we're going to call the roll. Would you call the role now?

DiBona, Hubley, Mahoney, McKee, Riley, Ryan, Yuan, Jacob.

Present. Thank you. And at this time, we're going to recess the Oversight Committee hearing and go back to the public meeting. And we're gonna pick up with Heather Doney.

Hi, my name is Heather Dhoni and I live at 912 Southern Artery. I want to talk about flock as well as bus patrol another mass surveillance tool we have here contracting with a competitor flock called Axon. On a personal note, I was pulled over by a state trooper using an ALPR system that got connected with the Massachusetts RMB database It had a registration error on a car my husband and I had just bought. The trooper thought he'd caught an undocumented immigrant. That's the only reason we got pulled over. Thankfully, we had all the right papers in the car but it was a dystopian encounter I haven't forgotten and probably never will. I get that for a lot of people here in Quincy, trust is built on long-term often lifelong relationships So if the police chief feels safe with this, they will feel safe. But police departments aren't IT don't get trained on databases and data sets like researchers and I believe that can lead to some gaps in understanding and planning, and I mean to be respectful about that.

I believe the police chief is feeling safe with something that is not actually safe for us, and if he understood all these details, he would hurry to make another choice. We've been reassured these cameras will help if there's an awful crime like a kidnapping or an assault. Unfortunately, the research just doesn't bear out the cameras doing that. whether it's right to be monitoring all law abiding citizens, to catch a few bad actors is also a value judgment and a lot of people including me feel very strongly about that. Over 30 of the 80 communities in Massachusetts with Flock have recognized this as a public policy, ethics and jurisdictional problem and decided to cancel their contracts. Just last week, a federal judge in Florida also ruled that these mass surveillance searches violate the Fourth Amendment this is a big conversation all across the country. Meanwhile, Quincy's getting negative press for having more flock cameras than any other city in the state. I've had friends from other cities texting me and asking me if it's true that's how I learned it was true.

It might be easy to conclude that you can safely keep these systems in our city if we clamp down on known misbehavior or limit access, limit the number of users, the searches to suspected suspected crimes, have audits and so on. But Flock is still publicly marketing this as daisy chain between cities all across this country connecting it to every database and AI system they can find. So who are they not being truthful with? You, me or the people who have never set foot in Quincy but want to conduct mass surveillance on port cities, on coastal areas and people that they have never met including you, including me, including all of us while we stay none the wiser. because my experience shows it happens quietly at night on a road with the state trooper, with a database that's attached. That's how it's done. The problem is still mass surveillance. No matter how much they say it's a closed system, it's about as open as a hospital gown. Like the back of a hospital down that's just the way that it's built

So I respectfully request that as part of the city's next steps, you put a trash bag on it and take them off our school buses. Thank you very much.

My fellow Councilors, it's been 45 minutes of this public hearing. We have nine more to go. I'm looking for a consensus vote on whether or not we'd like to just continue with the nine people. All in favor say aye. Any opposed? The ayes have it. So we'll continue, thank you.

Awesome. Thank you for your time. I'm Ethan 95 West Quantum Street. So I'll keep my statement brief because there's been so many amazing speakers behind me who have said such a depth of knowledge coming from different backgrounds. And I think this conversation that we're having is one that everyone in the nation is having to ask themselves, every state every city, every town, every person. And that question is do we sit back and let fascism take over or do we fight back and stand for democracy? These cameras have been shown time and time again that they are used by law enforcement, they're used by the Trump administration to track our neighbors, to detain our fellow residents attack protesters to monitor people expressing their freedom of speech.

The CEO of Flock has gone on record saying that those who speak up against these cameras are terrorists. And so if we continue to work with this company, I have to ask am I a terrorist? Are the people behind me terrorists? I'd certainly hope I certainly hope not. I don't think so, I think they're all lovely people so far but the fact that we continue to work with this company shown that it has zero regard for our freedoms, our amendments. Democracy itself begs the question where does the city of Quincy stand? Because clearly us residents have made our answer where we stand on fascism And so now the question is, where does city council stand? Where does Quincy PD stand and where does the mayor stand? I hope that the City Council will ban ALPRs from the city of Quincy.

until a decision is made that we bag the cameras or something to decommission them while we discuss further. Thank you.

Zachary, Christopher's going to be next. On deck are Brandon Lamb and Mia Calegara.

Hi, Zachary Christopher, 67 Montclair Ave. Apartment 2. But for those in the audience on the council and hi everybody at home I'm Bucket, Bucket the Clown. I of course am against flock and I'm sure everybody's heard the words mass surveillance so many times that their ears are starting to bleed, but I would like to bring a vision of the future because this is bigger than just flock. For those unaware, the Department of Homeland Security has a program on the southern border that are called integrated tower surveillance.

and newly what they're calling automated tower surveillance which are giant monolithic towers with optical cameras, thermal cameras, laser audio recording and radio waves. The whole shebang looking down on small border cities to police the undesirables. And with a new document from the US Government Accountability Office, called GAO26108118 DHS Annual Assessment. This is a direct quote, they are bringing the total number up to 2,300 towers.

adding approximately 2,000 towers 1,500 of which will be arranged along the northern border and all waterways and coastal port cities. The future that these people want is every street watched by ring cameras in neighborhoods and flock cameras on the main arteries Cameras in our trucks, cameras in our cars, cameras and our homes. And we all know the phones are listening and it's all connected to the same robot brain. This is terrorism designed to psychologically torture all of the people.

This is not okay. but while we're at it, let's put automated cream pie launchers on all of the systems. If a car is suspected of being involved in a crime shoot a pie at it then we'll know where it is, okay?

Brandon's going to be next, followed by Mia and Jacobs on deck after that.

Brandon Lamb, 82 Martinson Street, Ward 2. I don't know if I can beat that so I'll be kind of short. All of my fellow residents have said a lot of the points I've wanted to say. There's just maybe one more I might add, is threats of cybersecurity have been mentioned multiple times by multiple people. The time we're in right now is probably where cybersecurity is the greatest risk in human history. We have unregulated AI development that can very easily overcome potentially any cyber security apparatus that we have today So even if, you know, Flock or any other ALPR company says like oh we have secure systems. Even if Amazon Web Services says we have secured systems Unregulated AI could easily overcome any cybersecurity apparatus that we have.

and that means that right now we're setting up all these cameras and collecting all this data, and have no idea if technology that's developed in a year or in a month or in week or tomorrow can easily overcome and access all of that data. So even with, even putting aside Flock or Amazon or any other company intentionally using our data the wrong way there's unintentional use as a major risk in the future too So I think it's unwise that we set up something where we're collecting all this data, that we right now know that we can't manage in the future. And I mean the last thing I'll say is I would love for Quincy to have a lot of superlatives in Massachusetts. I would look for it to be the best place to live, I would like for it have the best schools in Massachusetts I don't want it to top Massachusetts in terms of number of flock cameras Thank you.

So next we have Mia followed by Jacob and then Brendan, sorry I can't read this is it Merak is on tap after that? So again, Mia then Jacob. Is Mia here? And then Jacob and then Brendan.

Hi, my name is Mia and I have a lot of concerns about these cameras. I don't think that we can simply call this surveillance. When you're in a store, maybe at least a few years ago and you see a camera there. You'd think okay that's normal because I know it's there to prevent theft. This isn't simply that. There's a reason that this feels creepy. I wanna name it. It's stalking, it's mass indiscriminate stalking and Flock is assisting that. Now, a lot of people have mentioned you know, Peter Thiel. I'd like to mention that the people who run this country have been found in the Epstein files. Same thing with Peter Thiele. and these people are the same people who are propping up mass surveillance companies, mass stocking companies, and then putting them on children's school buses. School buses that do not have the security

In short, I'd like to say that this is a crime even if it's not yet illegal. Thank you.

If you could just also, Jacob, if you could say your address because you didn't write it here. Jacob Levine, 140 Quincy Ave

The fears about flock have been well established here, so I'd like to focus a little bit on the pro-flock argument or my understanding of it. My understanding of how the network works as currently described is it's meant as a detective tool. In QPD, detectives seem to be the main ones who have access So I feel like the metric there should be its use in crimes cleared, prosecutions brought, things like that. And then to my knowledge, I believe I've seen one case where flocked to you successfully in a prosecution of any crime nationwide. Meanwhile, we have seen even recently a court federal court in Oklahoma rejected as warrantless surveillance and similar technologies, for example in cell towers using broad automatic searches have been as soundly rejected as violations in both the state and the federal level

Now, license plates are well established. Cameras are well-established as tools for prosecuting crimes but we have simply not seen flock used successfully and with respect to the departments, I believe there is a bias towards novelty-less tech or maybe if you're FOMO. But when it comes down to it we are not seeing it used where you see it used as secondary to normal detective work, was a large temptation to abuse and the creation of a culture of surveillance and distrust which I believe Hertz, the credibility of the police generally and the society we want to live in. So with that in mind I would like the council to look at this technology even though it may seem like the future and put it more towards the way of the Betamax. Thank you.

So we have Brendan, then Yvonne and then Yi Long. Brent if you could just give your address?

Yeah, certainly. 39 Park Street Ward 3. Good evening, Council. I'll be transparent from the get-go. My opinion, my belief, I think the outcome I'd like to see is a blanket ban in the city on ALPR technology. more of a risk than it is a reward, but I think that there's some things to talk about from like if this is our partner's perspective, people have already hit on it briefly but I'd like to expand on a little bit more. Marketing is a very big thing for these companies they spend a boatload of money on it and when they chose the name Flock when they coyly named every camera after a bird, it was intentional. It's because of the nature of the technology. The nature of technologies is it's a cluster.

Wall over everything, like you see flying over you when you see a big flock of pigeons, anything. They sit on the telephone lines. They're always there. There's so many of them. and to insist that it is closed, to insist the city goes against their marketing, goes against what they're putting out. That's basically that when you buy into this, you're buying into a network. That's the purpose of it. You're supposed to be able to see where they went after they left Quincy see that they went to Milton because I know our friends in Milton also have these cameras. I see them when I drive down Beale Street, it's not a fun experience to see one of these things pop up and I've seen them pop up throughout the city I've seen them popping up more and more.

And I'm glad that it's coalesced in this kind of public outcry, I guess. But yeah, my belief is that a blanket ban would be the best way to go about it because we don't have the legislative knowledge Deal with this at this time and you know five years from now maybe we have that understanding, and we can circle back on this but it's just not where it needs to be. I do agree with some of my previous colleagues that Black bagging these would be probably the least we could do. We've seen Waltham do it, we've seen Framingham do it before they took them down. I hear a lot of people saying well oh do we want to beat Cambridge? Do we wanna beat Cambridge which I'm not sure how much of an insult it would be call Quincy a Cambridge, but I'd like to be a Framingham or a Waltham. Those seem like lovely places to raise a family, to have a community.

So I think it would be a show of good faith from either the council or the police department in tandem to bag these and put out a report showing that that's been done.

So we have Yvonne, and then E. Long. Yvonne? Yvonnne, come on up. And then E Long. No first name. Are you Yvonne? Yvonne. What's your address? 25 Newton Ave. 25 what, say that again?

Newton Ave, yes. Good evening everyone, good evening council. I come here today to ask a bit of a rhetorical question for really everyone in the room as well. Why do we have curtains in our home and why do we put fences along our property line? I bring this question up to all of us, to reflect on what privacy means to us as individuals. I want to reiterate a lot of the points that our friends have made tonight. That we are becoming, the thing that we swore to never become is surveillance state and although Flock, says that the data is deleted after seven days.

It has been proven by Ben Jordan, a scientist that was able to easily hack into these cameras and he has seen that they do not delete the footage at all, that these cameras can also detect facial features and also document, store and categorize this information as well. and you can find his findings on YouTube under Cyber Crime Magazine where he uncovers that all these features that are misleading. This is not equivalent to traffic cameras or plate readers used by the parking department, but this is a very highly sophisticated tracking system that is storing information on our every move

and is connected to, like others have said a cloud. And as much as we can try to implement safeguards or quote unquote opt out nationwide system access At the end of the day, we don't actually own any of this information and our jurisdiction does not have ownership and it belongs to this private entity. The installation of these automatic plate readers threaten our livelihoods through the invasion of privacy. and even the CEO Flock Garrett, sorry, Garrett Langley values his own privacy over the mass surveillance system that he has built and sells to the public. a gentleman named Tyler Oliveira has hired a private investigator to follow the CEO Langley for three days and found that he used three separate vehicles with three different license plates traveling different routes every day.

So what does this say about our privacy? To me, it just shows that in this world, privacy is no longer a right and has now become a luxury. Thank you everyone.

This is the last call for Yi Long. After Yi Long is Christina Culler. You just state your first name and your address. Long, 94 Newberry.

I'm just gonna, a lot has been said today so I'm going to say what I learned in 10 minutes smoking a funny cigarette outside before this meeting. It was the McCarthy, Massachusetts versus McCarthy was about four cameras on two bridges. How many cameras are on the DePonset Bridge? The federal president that was brought up earlier U.S. First Kyle and it stated that pulling 30 day of historical travel history from flock safety databases without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, explicitly labeling it indiscriminate mass surveillance Google told me that 704,000 distinct vehicle captures in Quincy alone with only 134 queries

that's 99% of our law-abiding citizens' information just being held. The House bill in the Massachusetts legislature legislate three, was it 3755, wants the data be cut to 14 days as well as having a search warrant. On the 15th of September Mayor Koch said that Quincy is usually ahead of the curve. You guys can vote on it tonight and be ahead of a curve, thank you.

And Christina Keller Hi there, I'm Christina Kohler, 64 Glendale Road. I don't have anything prepared tonight. I sort of left right before my toddler's bedtime to try to make it here, remembered it right beforehand and I'm just out here because I really want to represent how many just like normal, concerned Quincy citizens and residents and folks who are trying to go about our day-to-day lives without being mass surveilled are really deeply worried about this. Folks have made some really wonderful and well-researched statements. And the thing that I really want to focus on and drive home here is how little we can trust the flock and any other company that is going to be working with our data in this way. Working in tech myself, there are a lot of very sensitive and careful ways to be working with data.

And we have seen over and over again through all of these instances that folks have brought examples of, that flock is just absolutely not trustworthy with that. I don't think that any company that is trying to get into this in this current Time and Age is going to be trustworthy. I will say, I think that this would be unfolding really differently if we were having conversation about the QPD saying we have... We built a new internal IT department that's gonna be rolling out some closed circuit, very carefully managed, owned and managed only within our own city-owned department. Fully data on the ground here I think that would be a really different discussion and a lot of the things that have been brought up so far would still be really relevant and pertinent but I do want to give appreciation for how QPD has been putting their own, as many safeguards as they can in place. But as other folks have said that is doing nothing if the data is not owned by us and one thing we are seeing more and more than ever in this day and age

Data is the absolute most valuable thing that you can have, period. That is more valuable than all of the money in our contract 10 times over to Flock. the amount that they are going to be able to get by selling that left and right to all of these other data mining companies that are gonna be able using that in all sorts of ways we do not want is way more than any lawsuit that they are ever going to get pinned down by. So all you need to know with these tech mega corporations, is what is going to make them a ton of money and in this situation we are the product for that. The contract we have with them is just the veneer, and we cannot be selling our own citizens' data in that way. I would ask the City Council and the QPD to please not buy into this any further, please end the contracts immediately. I love the idea of bagging the cameras every time I see one of these when I'm walking down the street with my kid,

My face is being tracked, I am being sold to who knows what. And I would really appreciate for the sake of all of our safety for that to be ended. Thank you.

So that brings us to the end of our public hearing. Did everyone out there get a chance who wanted to speak, did they get a change to speak? Speak now or forever hold your peace. You can speak, but you have to just sign in the back and you'll speak after after the guests have spoken. But if anyone in this room right now is thinking about speaking, I'll just recess this public hearing so that way after our guest speak we can open the public hearing back up and then that way they can speak. So at this time I'm gonna recess the public hearing, we're gonna go back into the oversight committee hearing where we're going to hear from our guests. We'll do that right now. I'd like to call back into order the October 6th Oversight Committee hearing.

Maggie McKee as the Ward 5 City Councilor representing Wollaston, Beechwood Hospital Hill thank you and part of Quincy Center Summer South Quincy, and then Councillor at Large Noel DiBona is also here. Earlier before you guys got here we kind of introduced all of ourselves so I just wanted to make sure you guys were introduced. Great. All right. So now that we're here in the Oversight Committee hearing, we're going to start with our Chief of Police Mark Kennedy who is assisted by Captain Ward of the Quincy Police Department and Lieutenant Flaherty of the quincy police department good evening chief

Good evening, everyone. Thank you for having me. If you'll indulge me for a minute, I just wanted to read an opening statement here and then give you a quick demonstration of how the flock technology actually works. So when I stood before this council on September 8th, I gave you my position on the Quincy Police Department's use of automated license plate reader technology or ALPR and why I believe we can use this technology responsibly while also protecting the civil liberties of the people we serve. I stand by everything I said that night, There was one area, however, that I had hoped to get into but simply just didn't have the opportunity to fully explain. And that's the history and timeline of the Quincy Police Department use of ALPR technology. Based on some of the feedback and questions I received after our last meeting, I believe there was some confusion about when we began using this technology, how it evolved and what steps we have taken to put safeguards around it.

So with your permission, I'd just like to take a few minutes to walk you through that timeline. The Quincy Police Department has been using ALPR technology for roughly 15 years. We first deployed ALPR Technology around 2011 when the cameras were mounted on the trunks of our Ford Crown Victorias. This was certainly not a secret program, you really couldn't miss them they look like black shoe boxes mounted to the rear of the car and at the time there were numerous stories around the country about the growing use of this technology by law enforcement agencies, and our use of it was certainly not intended to be hidden. In fact, we were responding to public records requests regarding our use of the technology as far back as 2012. In 2020, the department transitioned from the cameras mounted on our cruises to fixed ALPR systems through flock safety. I'll be candid with you. During that period, I didn't have much direct interaction with the system. I knew our detectives were using it but I had never personally used it because I wasn't assigned to a unit that required it.

that changed when I became Chief in 2023. As chief, I was now the one receiving the calls in the middle of the night about a serious crime Incident throughout the city and a follow up with our detectives. And I began to see firsthand how ALPR technology was being used in investigations, and I saw its value. I say I saw how that could help detectives identify vehicles, establish timelines, develop leads and ultimately solve serious crimes. And I became a believer in the technology. It was under my leadership that we expanded our use of ALPR technology to where we are today but I also want to be candid about something else. At that point, I was primarily seeing the benefits of the technology. It wasn't until the fall of 2025 when I read an article published by the ACLU concerning data sharing associated with ALPR technology that some of the additional concerns were brought to my attention. And, I'll admit it set some alarm bells off for me.

I began taking a much closer look at our own system, how we were using it and what policies and safeguards we had in place. And I realized we did not have a specific ALPR policy at that time, and that was concerning to me. because when I became chief in 2023, one of my priorities was to make the Quincy Police Department an accredited law enforcement agency. Accreditation means that our policies and procedures are reviewed by an outside auditor to ensure that we're consistent with state law. recent court decisions, and current best practices in policing. We began going through our policy systematically starting with our highest risk, highest frequency, and highest liability areas things like use of force pursuits and things like that This process is still ongoing today, and we're working towards accreditation in 2027. So when I realized in 2025 that we did not have a specific ALPR policy, we began the process of developing one By December of 2025, we had our first draft.

We also met with flock representatives to confirm exactly how we were using the system, who owned the data being collected, what controls were available to us and what safeguards or guardrails were in place. Based on that work, on January 15th, 2026 the Quincy Police Department issued its first formal ALPR policy. Then on March 13th, 2026 we conducted training for all ALPR users. We didn't simply issue a policy and put it in a binder We brought it to the people who actually use the system in a room, made sure they understood the rules, the guardrails and our expectations for how the technology was to be used. Then came June 7th I was invited to attend a Sunday afternoon meeting at the library concerning Flock. Although I wasn't allowed to speak that evening, I did speak with several residents afterward. One conversation in particular had a significant impact on me I spoke with a gentleman named Andrew who spoke here tonight.

He lives on Brook Road and he raised concerns that I had not previously heard regarding an incident in Mountain View, California and allegations concerning unauthorized data sharing that conversation caused me to ask a very simple question. Do we know exactly how our system is configured, who can access our information and where that information can go? I asked my command staff to conduct a comprehensive review of our ALPR system. And as a direct result of that review on August 6th, 2026 we shut off all nationwide sharing and all sharing with outside law enforcement agencies local state and federal. We then published the results of that review on the department's website on August 10th. Then, on September 8th I came before this council. I heard from residents. I listened to the concerns that were raised and after that meeting, I took an even deeper dive into our use of the technology. And as a result we made another significant step

we reduced our data retention period from 30 days to 14 days and we began the process of developing a new policy consistent with the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police Association model policy on ALPR use. So when I look at this timeline, I don't see a department that has been ignoring these issues. I see a Department that has used this technology for approximately 15 years for investigative purposes, and that has increasingly put policies, training restrictions, and oversight around that technology as we have learned more about its capabilities and its potential risks. And I think that distinction is important I believe in AL technology because I've seen firsthand what it can do for victims of serious crimes. But, I also believe that law enforcement has an obligation to recognize that just because technology can do something doesn't necessarily mean we should do the question for us is where that line should be.

And that is ultimately what our policies, restrictions, our audits and our oversight are designed to address. We have an obligation to protect our community from crime but I also believe we have an obligation to protect the constitutional rights and civil liberties of people who live in this city. I believe we can, and we must do both Now, if I could, I'd just like to walk you through. It's about four or five slides to show you how our system actually works.

Can I just say one thing? I inadvertently named Lieutenant Faherty, Lieutenant Flaherty. He doesn't mind. And I greatly apologize. I just want to congratulate Lieutenant Faerty on his recent promotion to lieutenant so We could all just give him a round of applause. Especially after he really helped me out down there at the waterfront, so thank you so much I apologize

No problem. All right, so what you're going to see here is the first of all when a detective or an investigator out of our 234 officers 48 of them have access to the system It's only our detectives, our accident investigators and a couple of supervisors and two crime analysts. So what they do is when they log in it's two-factor authentication so that there's no sharing of passwords The detective would log in, then they'd get a code sent to their work phone. They'd enter the code and have access to this flock search screen. So what you're going to see up on the top there is The red asterisks are all required fields, so you need a reason. You need the type of crime and you need case number. So what we did here You'll see the drop down on the top left there. So, the detective or the investigator will have to go in.

They have to pick the specific crime that they're investigating Then the bottom drop-down, they're going to put in the reason for the search. All of these have to be filled in and then they have to put in a case number. So that case number there is an actual case number, Detective Lieutenant Steve O'Donoghue helped me out so he did a test data CAT entry So if you were to run that case number in our system, it would come up as a flock test data. And he put, you'll see here, he put his work vehicle in the plate field so he's looking to see the timeline there between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and that's what we get, so between 11 and one on October 4th you'll see two areas where his vehicle was picked up, Bergen Parkway and Hannon Parkway within about two minutes of each other. So that's all we get. That's what a detective would get. They'd look at that as a lead

Now, what you'll notice here is we're not told whose vehicle that is. Flock doesn't have access to the registry of motor vehicles so that we know that that's a Quincy police vehicle or it's Mark Kennedy's vehicle. It doesn't know. The detective then has to take the next step and run that plate through CGIS, basically the Registry of Motor Vehicles, to find out who owns the car. So this isn't... The CGIS system is also independently audited by the state. If I wanted to run Drake May's car to see where he lived, I'd be getting a call from somebody that would probably be getting suspended and you'd have a new police chief so there was a second level of security when you're talking about these plates. And I think I didn't do a good enough job explaining that before, that we don't know whose car it is. All we're getting is a picture of a vehicle and sometimes a clear license plate. Sometimes at night it might not be clear. You might not get anything. That's all we're getting.

It's not live video, it's a capture of the specific vehicle that we were looking for and that is all I have on that. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

So I think what we're going to do is let everybody speak and then go back for questions. Thank you. Next we'll have the District Attorney of Norfolk County, Michael Morrissey.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Council. I'd just like to point out that obviously I'm one of the users of the results of FLOC in the District Attorney's Office but FLOCC is only a clue or lead in building a case and people aren't found guilty on the strength of flock alone. But you have to remember there's only a limited number of uses who have access to it. And it leaves an electronic fingerprint as to who is using the system, much as the same police who actually have access which contains some of the same data that may be available from Flock and even much more data is available. We allow them to use those products every day to help resolve issues in crimes, Now, to date no constitutional issues have been identified. And obviously that's something that I'm sure will make its way through the courts as we go along and abide by the Constitution.

but it's also important to point out that people forget that a violation of FLOC is often can lead to criminal charges A conviction of illegal use or activity can lead to a conviction which may carry with it both jail time, and for those of you that may be unfamiliar with the public pension system is that if you get convicted of a misdemeanor or felony in the course and scope of your employment you lose your pension. It's a pretty big penalty that people pay and so thinking of people want to willy-nilly go in and use this system now, I don't want to say too much about the penalties, but there is something that has been in the news more recently and that's winding its way through the courts which may have those types of outcomes. If you have any concerns about the use of flock in some respects, then do me a favor. Think about if you have your cell phone on right now, then I can tell and with a certain amount of data.

And obviously you need a search warrant to get into someone's cell phone but the amount of information that is included in your cell phone, it's unbelievable. It will put you right here at City Hall if you use Waze to get here I can tell you how you got here within 30 feet of accuracy can tell me where I'm standing. And so there's a lot more information if you use the health data in the phone, it's tracking every step. and there's other apps that most of us have, that will lead to data collection. And it's something that is obviously used by law enforcement on some of the more important cases now We work hand in hand on murder cases because by law, the district attorney has jurisdiction but we work with the local departments. But I just wanted to mention three examples that some people may be familiar with There was a violent assault at the MBTA and much of it was captured by the MBT cameras, but it didn't give us a plate. But it did show the attack and vehicle description

Now the MBTA, by the way, has some of the most advanced high resolution cameras in the Commonwealth and the information they get is extremely important. Much as many people here have sought to have body cameras you can get some great information from that but while you could see the crime and identify the car, it was Flock that actually allowed us to get the license plate and allow the Quincy police to track down the car to a neighborhood in Wollaston. and then later allowed them to enter the dwelling, it probably saved a woman from being brutalized further. So that's one good example that recent that people may be familiar with We had a gang slash drug-related shooting at the Quincy apartment complex. They had great security cameras at the complex that helped us identify what had happened and who was showing up. The assailants were well disguised, but vehicles were identified. Now Flock cameras allowed us to actually track those vehicles back before the event, to a merchant in Quincy that had good surveillance activities and helped us identify some of the perpetrators.

And then after the incident, Flock also helped us tracked them to another apartment complex after they committed the crime and killed the individual in the garage, to another complex in Quincy. And then eventually leading to a number of suspects being arrested and finally, some of you are familiar with Brookline as part of Norfolk County. And one of the more high profile events occurred when the MIT professor was shot to death and Brookline. Now, initially if you watched the event, the FBI made an arrest in Providence which later turned out they had a release individual, they had the wrong person. The FBI provided a description of a vehicle to surrounding communities, which honestly turned out to be inaccurate. And then they also said and it was widely distributed over the media that the activities at Brown University were not related to the Brookline shooting, which also turned out to be not true.

So when the Brookland event happened, the State Police assigned to the District Attorney's Office traveled to Brookline and they started obviously doing what you would expect, gathering data, canvassing a neighborhood. And because of the description of one of the younger members of the professor's family we helped to identify that the assailant was wearing a bright yellow vest, like a delivery person. And although we didn't have a full description, we did have someone with a bright-yellow vest Now, door-to-door canvassing netted footage of individuals with yellow vests walking on the sidewalks in that neighborhood. at that time. And then additional information came forward again through mostly private surveillance activities that showed a vehicle and in the vehicle was a gentleman wearing a yellow bright vest just like the one described, just like what I've seen on the street. So while we now had we believe the assailant in the car, we have a better description of the car which clearly was much better than what the FBI had down in Providence.

So we had to call and make a model, but no license plate on the vehicle. So again additional work was done on this case. And as we move through it, Brookline police state police continued to canvass and track the vehicle's movements down Commonwealth Ave. into Watertown, Waltham, and onto Route 128 North. A lot of that was done by old-fashioned police work, getting security cameras, talking to people who may have seen something but the funny thing about it, by happenstance there was a body camera that was on the route to actually pick up the assailant. And also there was flock cameras and I know someone mentioned Waltham there was a flock cameras in Waltham that allowed us to get the plate of the vehicle. So now we had a main plate, the make and model of the car, and then were able to with the main plate have the Maine State Police within hours talk to the owners of that plate and find out Plate had expired and was sold at a flea market. So that took them out of the picture, but now we know what happened to the place.

That information was then shared with the FBI who'd been researching the financial data and identified that the assailant had rented a storage unit in Southern New Hampshire. Ironically, the car with the main plates, the information that was gathered by the Brookline State Police was found at that facility. Later, as they entered the facility, they found out the assailant had been dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds and the same weapon that actually killed the MIT professor. So, phylloxamers were pretty instrumental in moving this case very quickly at a rapid pace to identify. Now we live and I've grown up in the city probably longer than most of you and my family's been here a long time It's a large city. We're next to one of the, obviously the hub, the City of Boston and the city has has had a long commitment to public safety.

We do well because of, many of you understand and if you go on to the local schools we have good schools, good public safety and people want to live here but being safe and being safe in your home is a critical function and now I know that there's obviously some concern about Flock but it's really another tool. No one gets convicted, in fact, Flock actually has exonerated people because people tell you a story If I was to say that if I told someone I was here at City Hall, I'm sure coming and going my car is gonna be on a flock camera heading to North Quincy. so they would know the time I probably, generally the time that I arrived but my telephone probably puts me in a room with you people right now. So I would just ask that, you know, I'm sure some changes can be made. I suggest that having spent some time in the legislature that it's also an issue for the legislators to consider as well because that also can provide some guardrails and safeguards but

I just hope that you don't get rid of what I consider one of the more valuable tools to stop violent crimes, especially when I first started as District Attorney. We had just two District Attorneys doing gun cases. Now almost every attorney in the Superior Court has a gun case because of proliferation of firearms. The largest single killer and preventable deaths in Norfolk County are drug overdoses, and obviously flock cameras have helped convict those people who were poisoning our young people so I just ask for your consideration of giving them and letting them use a tool with appropriate safeguards to allow this community be as safe as it is. Thank you

We're now going to have Gideon Epstein of Policy Council at the ACLU.

Good evening, members of the council. My name is Gideon Epstein and I'm a policy counsel with ACLU of Massachusetts with the ACLU's Technology for Liberty program. And our team has been working on and many more. Thank you very much. the Boston bombing. So that tells you how long we've been working on this issue and how long have we been trying to convince local, state and federal lawmakers to take a close look at this issue. Our team over the past year has engaged in widespread public records requests to police departments across the state, including the Quincy Police Department. And what we found from those public records request is that over 80 police departments with Flock Safety. And we found that this company, Flock safety was effectively incentivizing local police departments

to engage in widespread, often nationwide data sharing. We also found that Flock enables its customers to retain a license plate reader data for extended periods of time often 30 days which allows law enforcement to paint a very vivid picture of ordinary residents' everyday movements. We also found a number of contract problems, contract language that gave Flock the company and not its customers in law enforcement, the ability to control their own data. And the case that's been discussed in Boston where Flock shared Boston's license plate reader data against the wishes of local officials exemplifies this very problem. Even when Boston had better contract language that would have otherwise prevented the sharing of this data, Flock shared its data externally anyway, sharing Boston's data with Flocks nationwide network

and that just goes to show that municipalities are not in full control of their data when they're contracting with a company like Flock Safety. The other big takeaway from our public records requests was a lot of audit data, every single flock search is logged in reviewable audit logs that show individual police departments' queries within FLOX database, as well as external searches reflecting the complete scope of any data sharing going on. and as I mentioned a few moments ago, these audit logs first of all showed widespread data sharing. They showed that law enforcement and police officers places as far as Texas and Georgia and California were querying Massachusetts Police Department's license plate reader data, which puts a number of vulnerable communities at risk.

The other thing we found from these audit logs was very frequent use of completely vague and nondescriptive search reasons. Search reasons like information or investigation, or wanted. These are the same kinds of searches that leave police departments unable to hold officers accountable who make them. So here in Quincy and across the country, we saw officers making searches with those kinds of vague search reasons and those kinds of searches completely leave the door open for potential abuse. And one example that I think is poignant to that point, is that in Milwaukee, for example A police officer used the search reason of investigation over 120 times to track a single vehicle and subsequent investigations revealed that that officer was tracking their ex-girlfriend at the time, as we've seen in other cases throughout the state. Taking a step back, I just want to talk about some of the basics of license plate readers.

I don't wanna spend too much time on it but of course I think all of us know These are AI-powered cameras placed throughout roadways in Massachusetts and here in Quincy, and they capture a remarkable amount of information about every passing vehicle, not just vehicles with someone who's suspected of some kind of criminal wrongdoing. Literally every passing a vehicle. These cameras not only collect license plate information but other vehicle fingerprint information like the make, model, color and any distinguishing characteristics of every single passing vehicle. And that's why this technology amounts to dragnet surveillance meaning it collects data on all of us aiming to identify possible criminal behavior, but ultimately ends up in the erroneous detention or arrest of many individuals. And those kinds of issues not only come down to human error, they also come down machine error. These flock cameras do not read license plates accurately 100% of the time

DHS reports suggest that flock cameras read license plates accurately about 93% of the time. meaning that for a substantial chunk of reads, the machine is simply making an error and those kinds of errors result in erroneous stops of innocent people who have nothing to do with criminal activity. and in some cases, they also result in criminal arrests. We recently heard about a case in the recent congressional hearing where a woman in Florida was arrested and subsequently detained for several days because her license plate was read incorrectly. So there is the possibility and the likelihood humans making mistakes or abusing this technology. And there's also the risk that the machines themselves will make mistakes and I think that's an important point to understand.

beyond all the information that these cameras collect on every single passing vehicle, the most important thing for you to understand is that this is location tracking technology and that's why this technology implicates our constitutional rights. and I want to talk a little bit about the legal landscape with respect to license plate readers at the moment. A lot of prior speakers have given helpful snapshots, but just to give you the fuller picture When you think about proponents of flock license plate readers, they often suggest that drivers don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy on public roadways. And our team would entirely disagree with that very premise. The Supreme Court has said in cases like Carpenter of the United States and more recently in Chautry that people do retain a reasonable expectation of privacy even as they move about in public places.

Those cases were with respect to other sorts of location tracking technology but other federal courts are beginning to address this issue of license plate reader surveillance and location tracking as well. As folks have mentioned, a federal judge in Oklahoma just a few days ago ruled that use of flock cameras did constitute a search for constitutional purposes under the Fourth Amendment, and law enforcement in that case would have been required to obtain a warrant. In that case, law enforcement decided to track the historical location movements of a woman simply because she had a California license plate while traveling in Oklahoma. So that gives you an idea of the kind of facts that are the basis for that decision, finally here in Massachusetts, regardless of what's going on in Oklahoma or in the Fifth Circuit which many flock proponents frequently cite because there are conflicting court decisions

use of license plate readers constitutes a search for constitutional purposes, but what really matters is what courts have said here in Massachusetts. And here in Massachusets our highest court has said in Commonwealth v McCarthy that with enough cameras and enough locations use of this technology would constitute a search for constitutional purposes. So courts are beginning to erect guardrails around this kind of technology, but we're not yet at that point where there are sufficient guardrailes We also don't have any statewide guardrails here in Massachusetts, unlike effectively all of our neighbors across Massachusetts. In Maine, in Vermont, in New Hampshire they have strong license plate reader regulations in place. And to some extent, there may be frameworks like New Hampshire state law that prevent license plate readers from acting as true dragnet surveillance technology

basically, if you can purge non-suspect's information extremely quickly then you could still allow law enforcement to retain that information. But the main takeaway is that Massachusetts does not have that kind of legislation enacted right now and it's very challenging at the local level to enact guardrails that are sufficient to prevent abuse of this technology. And that's why I'm here to echo residents ask for you a complete ban on license plate reader technology and a band that's not limited to only this sort of surveillance technology. We have also historically supported bans on facial recognition, and I think many residents concerns covered the fact that license plate readers have developed greatly technologically over the past 10 to 15 years in terms of their AI capabilities. it's not yet clear where we're going from here. And that's why it's important for local leaders to take control over this technology,

this technology was deployed without any kind of meaningful consent, any kind a meaningful democratic consent and that's why in addition to a local ban we would ask the council to consider an ordinance that would give the community true control over police surveillance tools. in other words, giving the council the authority to approve or disapprove of specific enumerated surveillance technologies like license plate readers, like facial recognition because this issue is so much bigger and just one company or one type of technology, there's a host of AI-powered surveillance technology already here. And it's a good idea for communities to take stock of their local police department's use of these technologies and ensure that there's a true public process before any possible continued use of any of these technologies. So in closing, I'll repeat that we are encouraging the council to completely ban Thank you very much.

and that's why it's important for local leaders to start at square one here, and from the outset ban this technology. And if they choose to hold a public process to discuss possible reintroduction of any technology like license plate readers. Ultimately, in closing, Flock is an incredibly unreliable company when it comes to license plate reader vendors generally. We've heard about a number of cases here in Massachusetts and places like Littleton and Cambridge where Flock has put up or reactivated cameras after local leaders have chosen to pause deployment of them. they also opened the door for abuse. And I appreciate everything that the local police department here in Quincy has done to erect some basic guardrails around this technology, but there are also should be accountability for the fact that there were effectively no rules in place for nearly a decade, it seems since this department has been deploying license plate readers for some time at this point.

This is Dragnet surveillance without democratic consent, and I want to thank you for your time. Happy to answer any questions you might have after.

Okay, we're going to have Matthew Ross, a professor from Northeastern University in Economics.

Thank you for having me. My name is Matthew Ross, I'm an associate professor of public policy and economics from Northeastern. I will try to focus my comments on two areas of my expertise one is what we know about FLOC, the benefits, the potential costs. The second is how I think you all should and I think about these sort of questions implement a new technology that enhances public safety and sort of how to weigh the costs and benefits for a decision like this. Before I do that, I would be remiss especially as an academic if I didn't give you my credentials here but I wanna just give you a bit of background about myself so that when we get to the question phase, you sort of know where to direct your questions. I am certainly not a lawyer. I'm also not a law enforcement expert. I trained as an economist all of my work to date focuses largely on the economics of crime, policing enforcement activities.

I have done research with large policing agencies across the country Dallas Texas Seattle Washington DC Metro also served as a subject matter expert and an expert witness for the US Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division. I've also done it for number of state attorneys generals, New Jersey, Virginia I've also served as a expert witness on plaintiff's side, so I've worked for the ACLU before. I've been a witness for the City of Boston for Boston PD. So the way that I would think about this is, as the Chief alluded to, license plate readers have been around for quite a while. Remember when I've done a ton of work in Connecticut I remember when they first rolled out there and you know, I went on a ride along probably 15 years ago with when the first time they had license plate readers in a car. and it was like amazing technology back then.

They would flip on a switch, license plate reader would go on you just hear pinging about unregistered expired registrations, expired license plates What's different about Flock Technologies, sort of just to set the scene here, is that it is really – they're a tech company. They started off providing low-cost license plate readers. That was their comparative advantage in the marketplace. They were using basically cell phones that were hooked up to the Wi-Fi network Today they've moved far beyond that, so they create a network of linked data that can trace out an individual's movements over time and space. I think also, you know, One thing I want to point out is Flock continues to market itself as an ALPR vendor. That's how they sort of sell themselves to the public and policing agencies, and I think it's slightly disingenuous. They are a technology company first and foremost their plans are larger than license plate readers. They've announced publicly that they plan to move into facial recognition technology.

It's also from the contract language I've seen in other states, they publicly will say things like Quincy owns Quincy's data, we don't own any of Quincy data. We don't sell the data, the license plate scans to third-party companies. If you actually look in the language of most their boilerplate contracts it is not actually true Flock does not technically own the data, but they maintain a perpetual license that lasts forever. And while they're not allowed to sell scans of the license plates to outside entities, they are allowed to aggregate that up and sell it as data So I'll confess as a researcher, I've used data from third party cell phones. I've use it for research purposes. I have access to data now that's 10% of the US population anonymized cell phones So no doubt in the future, Flock like any of these other companies that gobbles up this kind of data will inevitably sell it for marketing purposes. Just to set the playing field about what the technology actually is.

I'm not necessarily for or against Flock, right? I think my position is that we actually, Flock perhaps could be a low cost effective way to clear more cases many police departments across the country to solve a problem where they have a scarce number of detectives, right? There's fewer detectives are operating on tighter budgets than ever before. Maybe this is an effective way to solve more crimes. but as of right now, the state of the evidence that scholarship around this area is completely lacking. So there have been by my count I think five-ish reputable studies on flock and I would say only one of them is really considered rigorous The other, there's two that are like artisanal one-off studies in small agencies maybe the size of Quincy. right, we think a study that's the size on a particular city that's a size of Quincy is probably not generalizable to the whole country. I certainly don't. The other studies that have been done

that have shown big benefits from Flock were commissioned, in fact, by Flock and they were done in ways that were not so rigorous. There is to date one study that I would consider rigorous on Flock, and it shows small to, I would say modest benefits in terms of motor vehicle theft and low level property crimes. There is no evidence that flock has broadly helped policing agencies solve violent crimes or more serious types of offenses. Now, that said there are numerous anecdotes out there that they have been helpful in identifying where missing persons solving Amber Alerts solving shootings where they don't know the individuals involved. There are anecdotes about that, but to date there is no evidence that that is the case. You know, the other thing that I you know at the start of this I said I would speak to is how to weigh the cost and benefits.

So as an economist, you know, I study crime, I studied policing but I'm an economist and I, you now, the way I think about things is in terms of cost benefit analyses so if I was weighing Flock Technology, I think relative to what the law enforcement agency is actually purchasing in terms of technology, the costs are relatively low. As I said, I think I personally am a little bit skeptical about why they're so low and what they're intending to do with all of that data eventually to subsidize that low cost. It's the same thing with social media platforms being cheap because they eventually aggregate all that data and sell it The other thing I think I'd be concerned about in terms of cost is that while there might be benefits in terms solving property crimes, I think i'd have some concerns about how folks like those in this room view the police going forward, right? I tend to think about policing as really having three inputs. One of them is police officers, manpower.

The other one is technology like flock and the third and one of the most important ones is community cooperation So if you are increasing technology which is improving public safety, I think I'd also be worried at the same time you're decreasing community cooperation. You have less people willing to talk to the police, cooperate with the police. So yeah, with that I will bring it to a close. Happy to talk about any of my concerns or more specifically about the research. any of the research papers that have been done to date. As I said, I think the evidence is fairly limited. I will add one other thing just to emphasize that last point. The evidence is so limited that I am at Northeastern I'm a fellow with one of these large philanthropies that does criminal justice research. And just two weeks ago, they put out a call to a select few of us that do this type of thing basically offering to give us hundreds of thousands of dollars to go study flock technology because there's so little research out there.

So don't think the benefits are documented quite in the way that the company pitches them as, thank you.

Thank you so much. We'll have Brian Hurley, a Quincy resident and systems engineer.

Hello, my name is Brian Hurley. As stated I'm an assistance engineer. What this essentially means is that some of my duties involve evaluating different products and services offered by vendors and then I implement and maintain those products after they've been purchased. I have been in this role for about three years now with six years total working professionally in information technology. I want to just first say thank you for inviting me here tonight. This is both an exciting and honestly slightly terrifying experience. First, for the sake of transparency I want to quickly just state my personal opinions on ALPR technology that Flock and others offer. And then I'm going to go into my professional opinion based on my current experience, and the documents that were provided in the agenda for tonight's meeting.

Personally, I believe that ALPR systems and other mass surveillance tech is unethical and does not really respect the privacy of everyday citizens. The only thing that tech like this does is generally make people feel angry and scared and I personally don't really support it. Now for the professional part, like I said, I'm gonna go into the documents specifically the flock customer agreement that was provided This is going to be a little bit wordy because I am quoting a few things from that document. So under that customer agreement, section 1.2 states that agency data meaning the data media and content provided by the agency through the services for an avoidance of doubt, the agency content will include footage and geolocation information and environmental data collected by the sensors built into these units.

In this case, the agency that they're referring to is Quincy PD and the units are the actual flock devices Later in section 4.2 on agency and non-agency end user data, it states that Quincy PD will grant Flock a quote non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable worldwide royalty free fully paid license to use reproduce modify and distribute the agency data and non-agency end user data as a part of the aggregated data defined in Section 4.4. In Section 4, on aggregated data. It states that, quote, FLOC shall have the right to collect and analyze the data and other information relating to this provision use and performance of the various aspects of the services and related systems and technologies.

It also states that Quincy Bede, quote, acknowledges that FLOC will be compiling anonymized and or aggregated data based on this agency data. At first the sounds fairly good. However, nowhere in this document does it state what steps will be taken to anonymize this data or what type of data that they plan to redact. This is a very important thing to have and normally should be covered in agreements like this. I have to read through agreements like these all the time as I evaluate different products, and as an example of why this is important to have I just say, or I just point to the December 2025 release of documents from the Department of Justice and related to the Epstein files. You might have heard on the news that these files were blacked out.

However, if someone were to highlight them and copy and paste that into a new document you could easily see all of the redacted-out information. Because that processes are not explicitly provided in this document, we don't know if our data is being anonymized by similar ineffective practices. Also in section 4.4, it states that this aggregated data may be used for marketing purposes or to help develop their services. Keep in mind that by develop their service since they tend to use a lot of AI in image recognition, this means that they are using that information to train their models. and despite how you may feel about a lot of the larger AI companies that they're, in the things that they are doing I think it's important to remember that those companies are at least providing you with the option to opt out but the exact same type of data collection

that Flock can currently do under this agreement. All of this is something that I would find very concerning if this agreement were to show up on my desk. Because of this, I would support the removal of this technology. Thank you.

And our last speaker tonight will be Maxfield Capron, Quincy resident representing a local civic group raising awareness about flock.

Sorry, give me a minute to set up here. All righty. Good evening, Councillors. My name is Maxfield Capron. As we already know, we've announced that I live at 118 Greenleaf, and this is my second ever speech at a public hearing. This time obviously I'm a speaker But something I want to mention is even though this is my second time, I have been following a civic action and community action for a long time now. and throughout my degree, I'm currently a student at Bridgewater State University studying astrophysics. Something that is very important to me

like the sort of things that we go through in terms of data analysis, making sure that everything is properly audited and making sure everything is consistent and credible. So something I just wanted to talk about today is QPD's current flock usage, their searches. the network audits and everything relating to public data requests that we have made over the period of this year. So as many of you know or maybe not, Flock cameras, they hold this data in a database. All of the searches that are made through QPD and through sort of like the other networks that are searching into our system.

So, that might be like Texas or any other federal department they have access and we see these logs. So over the period of this year, there have been two requests that have been made public data requests Both of these data requests contain event logs. So anytime the system, anytime a user is added or deleted, any time a hot list is created or destroyed anytime an agency is given access or not and any time a hot list is updated, anything like that. The second kind of data that is contained in these files are network audits. Network audits are essentially a giant list of every single department that has searched our Quincy system and the third type of data is that same exact thing but only for QPD.

So it shows the amount of searches that QPD has made over months, what kind of searches whether they contain case numbers or not and yeah, so what I'm gonna be talking about today is essentially the research that we've done an analysis of both of these data requests formalized into a paper that is before you today. and the independent data analysis for FLOC ALPR program in Quincy, Massachusetts. So I just want to share some findings, some fairly concerning findings through this data analysis. So when I initially put this all together and have been thinking about it for the past month since our first hearing on FLOC on September 8th, and I learned that we could just look through the public data and see what exactly QPD has searched, whether or not

they've been compliant with actually inputting a case number and things like that. and when I kind of combined that research aspect of my degree to the sort of civic action spark that I've been feeling for a while now. and that kind of coalesced into some public outreach. That led to a coalition like research group, that has gone through about three years worth of data ranging from January 1st of 2023 to all the way up to September 6th of 2026. So this data is split up between two datasets. One of them is MuckRock. Muckrock is an independent platform that

that kind of takes these searches and hosts it on their databases, on their websites and making them publicly available, easily accessed for the public to be able to audit similar to me and others. and the second request was a private request that our research team conducted, and the date ranges for those two data releases. Data release one is from the first of January, 2023. to April 22nd of 2026. The second data release that we received through the Second Public Data Request ranges from the beginning of this year, January 1st, 2026 all the way to September 6th of 2026. So there's two data sets, all ranging from the beginning of 2023 to all the till September 6, 2026, there's a little bit of overlap.

So something I just want to talk about is our sort of findings on the exact numbers, like the amount of network requests that were made month to month. So if you look at, I believe it would be Appendix E in your copies of the report So in Appendix E, this is the data overlap between January of 2026 and March of 2027. Data export one is that muck rock data and Data Export 2 is our personal data request. and you can see the date that says January 2026, February 2026 March 26. Something that concerned us when we were looking at this data is just the raw numbers

So total network searches in January of 2026, in the first data export are 610,226. But in the second data release that we requested We were looking at this same month, and that number changed. There's a discrepancy. This is now at the total network searches is now 601,599. This isn't just the network searches either. This also pertains to the QPD system as well, the amount of searches that are being made to the flock system. So if you can see January 2026 to both of the data exports, you can total QPD searches is 682. for the first data export, and only 653 for the other data export. What this is telling us is either Flock is intentionally hiding these or they're being rescinded

for some reason, maybe the case wasn't valid or maybe the search wasn't valide. Or they're just disappearing which is heavily concerning because if we are talking about these data releases holding people accountable, both the corporations and the people using them. If we're seeing data go missing then how are we supposed to know that something isn't being covered up here? adding up, something here just isn't adding up. And so what I also want to highlight is some other concerning things One thing in particular is we wanted to know what percentage of searches made to the system contained case numbers.

from the beginning of our data set in January, 2023 all the way up until February of 2025 not a single Search contained a case number, not a single one. Next month was only 1.7%. And so that kind of brings us, actually let me just reiterate. You can see this data in appendix C and D where they are both the data from MuckRock and the data form our personal search and that kind of just shows like we have a column for the percentage of QPD searches with a case number. And so this kind of just tells us that a case number for a long time has not been required for any searches.

and if they are, sometimes they can be filled in a free text field where sometimes they could just be put in as ABCD or the letter A or a name, or something else that is not related to a case number. Doesn't have to be a case member it just something needs to be in there. Sorry, I'm just reorganizing myself a little bit. My brain is scrambled. So the last thing that I also want to highlight that is concerning to me throughout like some of the event logs, some of individual searches that were created and some of hot lists that were Let me just define a hot list here.

A hot list is essentially when an officer or an authorized user wants to track a specific person of interest over a certain specific period of time, so they can input a license plate and any time that license plate passes by any of the cameras, they will instantly get a notification of when and where. And those hits are logged in that hot list specifically. In the hotlist field, which I believe is yes, Appendix A you have the timestamp of when the Hotlist was created. Who created it? The event type, whether it was created or not and the entity details. So for example and the very first one here, if you are all looking at Appendix A. We have a hot list name for Drug Invest

with a license plate number, with no state description, no case number and no expiration. And pardon my vulgar wordage here but the reason listed is Jizz and the next one after that is listed as Jizz Buyer. Throughout the rest of this report are other examples of some of these egregious things, like Islamic radical did fed time. No case number. one that concerned me the most on August 6th of 2026. Missed connect with white female, no case number listed as DCU Drug Invest This also follows into independent searches as well, where if you look at the next part some of the reasons listed are I am cool.

As well as gypsy. Thank you for your time.

I just want to thank all of our guest speakers tonight. I think they had a lot of information to share with us, and I thank everybody for getting up and speaking. It is very nerve-wracking. I'm sure you did a great job. Everyone did a phenomenal job. from here on out. The councillors, if you have any questions now will be the time we'll take questions and we'll start with Ward 3 Councillor Walter Hubley

All right, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Excellent job setting up this session. I wanted to say that publicly the way you framed it and the way set expectations in these sequence of events. I really appreciate how thorough that's been so thank you , through you. So I've come in with a number of questions from constituents and questions that I have for myself, As a bit of background, my day job I design physical security systems that include camera systems Noel DPR as well as door access controls much like Mr. Fitzmaurice who mentioned earlier A number of questions that I had, I think a lot of them got answered by the presenters. So first off thank you very much for everyone who came in with a well prepared presentation. I think the sign of a good presentation is one

anticipates questions and provides the answers, which sometimes leaves questioners with a little bit of a gasp of what to ask about. But I do have a number of issues. A number of questions first. Let's see. So I think we covered the number of police officers that have access to it, like it was 47 was the number if I'm not mistaken those are all detectives and detective supervisors Let's see, the current date of retention that Chief explained earlier was 30 days. We're thinking about moving to 14 days or have moved to 14 day if I heard that correctly? Let's just see, when it comes to sharing data with other agencies outside of Quincy currently that answer is none. we are a configured closed system.

Yeah, you're welcome to come up if you want to reiterate or expand upon thank you and some of my questions may bop around to different people so apologies for that. Just kind of going through a rapid fire earlier one of the other questions that my constituents asked was what are those sort of safeguards and accountability measures I think District Attorney Morris he covered that very well in terms of the misuse which is a criminal offense, possible jail time loss of pension. I think that answers my question on that. Now as for the questions that I don't yet have answers to, and this is to you Chief. Thank you very much. Mr. Ross gave us a rundown on different studies out there and much like in most industries, everything from nutritional things sometimes you'll have a study but it's sponsored by Nestle or whatever. You always kind of have to follow the money

Mr. Ross reported that a number of the studies out there were sort of funded by flock or folks with flock interest so it's a lot of my constituents were asking, do we have a way of knowing what kind of positive impact that we're having? A way to quantify it. I think people appreciate the anecdotals on both sides There's definitely been sort of anecdotals of how abuse could happen. There's been anecdotes on how it can help us. My question is, do Quincy Police Department have any mechanism or level of reporting how many of what type of cases it's helped with where otherwise we might not have been able to resolve?

Yeah, thanks for the question, Councilor. So do we have you know there's the saying that you don't need to be a seismologist to recognize an earthquake, but I do agree it helps to have the Richter scale sometime. I know there has been some studies, I know Dr. Robin Engel at Ohio State is looking to see if there is a discernible difference in communities that utilize ALPR, if they have lower crime rates. But I can tell you it's working in Quincy. These aren't anecdotes. These are actual people, victims survivors we had commercial breaks home invasion with a firearm burglaries sexual assaults kidnapping a homicide that the DA, actually two homicides. One down in Germantown that we use this technology for won at the Elevation Apartments that the District Attorney spoke of. That flock was instrumental. Shootings, another kidnapping, sexual assault

we're using this technology and it's working for us. So again, I can't quantify the number. We're working on a new records management system right now so there is some talk in that if we could do The system we have right now is, we got it right after Agadon. So it's about 27-28 years old and it really doesn't have the analytics so I'm hoping that in our new software we can start tracking these things.

Okay. The other question that my constituents reached out to me on is, to try and get an understanding of the quantity in we'll say resolution of cameras that we have within our community. We have a distinct honor of being among the top, or if not the top in Massachusetts and I'm just curious what Design Strategy went into that deployment, which led to the number of cameras that we have. I know all of us were encouraged to meet with you guys individually to ask some questions In that conversation, there was one thing that stuck in my brain which is so for example Furnacebrook Parkway as you get to the expressway You really have to have multiple in order to know which direction they took once getting on the rotary or roundabout, depending upon where you're from. So I can understand things like that but is there any additional information you might be able to provide that kind of can help the public understand

why we have as many cameras as we have and where we go about putting them.

Yeah, so there's been a lot of misinformation out there specifically revolving around this technology. We do not put them in neighborhoods. They're on main roads in the city mainly points of ingress and egress of the city. So we see vehicles come and go when you see Detective Lieutenant O'Donoghue's car that I put up there, that was two in a period of two hours captured his vehicle twice. I don't know where else he went. He was obviously in the city for a while, but in two hours he only popped by two cameras. So we're not tracking him and the idea that this is somehow surveillance, I pulled up the numbers as I was sitting here. In the past 30 days, 689,431 plates, vehicles were captured in the city. We only searched 76 times. 99.99% of the plates that are captured and the vehicles are captured are never looked at. they're never looked at.

They are permanently deleted within 30 days and it's soon going to be 14 days. So, you know the we have to understand that the city of Quincy is about 26 square miles, 226 miles of roads and 103,000 people. So 48, 49 flock cameras strategically placed at points of ingress and egress and I'm aware of the Commonwealth versus McCarthy case in those four cameras. The reason that's significant, they were on the Tobin and the, I'm sorry, on the Bourne and the Sagamore Bridge so the argument was you couldn't basically get on and off the Cape without the state police knowing it. So that was really when people say four cameras and we have 49, that's where that came from. So again there's a lot of misinformation I'm happy to kind of clear some things up to answer your question, it's really just how we sort of strategically place them. And they're not in neighborhoods like I said. They're on main roads basically

if you can't park on it during a blizzard, that's a road it's on. That they're on.

Okay and I'm gonna ask the same question to some other folks but from your perspective as the Chief of Police and with their legal background with respect to the mosaic as described in versus McCarthy. At what point in time do you think things change from an observation to a search? In your view, how is this different?

The search is when we actually put in either a vehicle description that's wanted for a crime. You know, the make or model. Sometimes you don't have a plate. Sometimes So that's when it's actually searched, then it becomes a public record and it's auditable. but the rest of them, like I said, 99.9% of the time we are not surveilling people. We're not trying to find out... The idea that we have them pointed at playgrounds, I've heard that it's preposterous We don't have them pointed at John Adams Cemetery. They're on main roads in the city to capture vehicle plates and identification. and like I said, the vast majority of them are never looked at. So you know, I disagree respectfully with the term surveillance that some of my fellow panelists have spoken up tonight. I don't see it as surveillance.

Are there any other things that you listened to from some of the other testimonies that you feel inclined to maybe try to expand upon or clarify? Just give me an opportunity.

Yeah, I mean, I've heard a lot like I said, John Adams was brought up. John Adams famously said facts are stubborn things. The facts are we're not surveilling the citizens of Quincy. The fact's how we use this technology incredibly judiciously the facts are 99.99% of the plates captured I never looked at, never searched. We're not surveilling people. We are using this tool to help our investigators solve crimes. Everything from motor vehicle hit and runs we were able to find somebody who had made some concerning statements to his spouse and we were able to use the technology to find him and get him help. We found missing persons, we've interrupted armed robberies with this technology We're finding stolen cars. It's incredibly beneficial that our detectives and investigators can get answers in minutes as opposed to days, and I understand the old school gumshoe way of sitting there for hours and hours

and looking at, you know, a day's worth of video trying to find the vehicle. Can we do that? Sure. When I started, show my age, 28 years ago, we were handwriting reports and we would take them, press hard. You're making four copies and put them in a file cabinet and that was secure. Now we have an online CAD records management system that also goes to the cloud. It's technology that could be hacked into. we do our best to try and protect that data, but unfortunately in the world we live in pretty much anything can be hacked. So you know, we do out best to secure things, but I don't wanna go back to the days of handwriting reports and put them in a file cabinet in the basement either So we put some safeguards, some guardrails around this technology, and I believe that we're using it incredibly responsibly. We're gonna continue to listen to people as we just did in the past two weeks reducing our retention period

You know, there's a lot of good points. I'm not trying to minimize anybody's opinion specifically but the bottom line is, the fact is we are not surveilling the citizens of Quincy. We are using this technology incredibly judiciously and we are solving crimes with it.

Thank you, Chief. And thank you for the time that you allotted me over the past couple of weeks. I think I've had a couple of visits with you and your team just to get my head around things and ask my questions. I really appreciate that. This next question, if you'd indulge me for a couple more questions, if that's OK? This next is actually for the gentleman from the ACLU, if So thank you very much earlier for your testimony. It's been very helpful and informative, though one thing I'm trying to get my head around after looking through the different case law and the different perspectives in articles that I've read on this matter is what's the dividing line between a data set being like an observation that an officer could make on the side of a road or a set of officers

versus like this mosaic concept, this picture of someone's life and becoming a search in the subject to will warrant. How do you view that or would you be the right person to ask about that?

Sure. It's a great question. And like I said, it's one that courts are grappling with so I wouldn't want you all on the council leaving with the perspective that every single query of FLOX database is a search or that none the searches of Flock's database constitute constitutional searches. It depends on the facts of the case, it depends on how many cameras are being queried and that's a core component of what was missing from the record in Commonwealth v. McCarthy, the defense attorney at trial level only preserved for the record the use of four license plate reader cameras on a couple of bridges and what they likely should have done is preserve for the record, the full scope of license plate readers query with that search. And that might've resulted in a different outcome. I think the other analogy that I'd raise for you on this point is that when we look at searches in other contexts, like a search of a vehicle for example, the scope of the search is not only any evidence found from that search.

The scope of this search is every place that law enforcement look through. So for example, with a search of a vehicle the scope of the search is that entire vehicle it's not only the contents within that vehicle that may suggest some kind of criminal activity and that analogy is directly applicable to flock cameras too because the scope of the search is not only the cameras that show that a certain person passed by them, is the full network of cameras being queried, which in many cases can be tens of thousands. Especially if we're talking about flocks nationwide networking queries into that database.

Right, when I started to think through both from an assembled set of data or individual pieces of data. I tried to analogize it to some stuff that I worked with in the past so in previous career broadband industry telephone provider I would often get contacted by whether it was the State Police, Treasury Department even looking for call detail records, CDRs, envelope information of text messages, all these data sets. and I often viewed it as the envelope information, for example of an email is not necessarily a search but the content of course is. So there's a difference between that type of metadata versus content intercept and I would get those as well, those requests. So I started to try to draw a parallel or an analog if you will between this information and that information and then under what circumstances can you search for those things

and whether you need an administrative subpoena, a warrant or whether it can be provided from an exigent circumstance request. and so do you have any thoughts on how this data either in individual records, small slices or in larger datasets would fit into those paradigms?

I mean I think your point gets to the fact that there are a number of surveillance systems that can be queried in concert with flock cameras. And I think that's really where the future of this kind of policing technology is headed. For example, companies like Flock, Axon and Motorola they are advertising and marketing what are called real-time crime centers which aggregate data from license plate readers, from other sorts of CCTV cameras that may be enabled with AI analytics to identify people or objects within them. and these real-time crime centers also aggregate data from other sources. So those kinds of technologies will end up guiding court's decisions with respect to the aggregation of this data, the centralization of this which even further opens the door for potential abuse when you have that kind of centralization.

Okay, one final question then I'll let my colleagues jump in. I apologize for taking so much time. Last question that I have and I may come back later if there's time from your advocacy, do you have a sense for when our state legislature might take this up? Because I feel like what's happening is and it's not uncommon and one of the speakers earlier addressed this which is oftentimes there's emerging technologies, but then of course the governance of such technologies follows and that's natural because as legislators, both local and national. We're not building things or we're not creating things so we're always playing catch up. Have you had any engagements? I mean, I have but I don't want to lead the witness when they might take this up? Because that's probably where it should go. But in the meantime, us local folks are going to have to figure it out until then. So any thoughts?

We completely agree the state legislature should take this off. We've been asking them to for over 10 years now we supported legislation this past session, H-3755. We aim to support stronger legislation now that we've heard such immense pushback from Massachusetts residents to this technology. So it's absolutely my hope that in the next legislative session, in the 27-28 legislative session that state lawmakers will take this up but it remains to be seen what those regulations would look like.

McKean.

Thank you so much. I just want to start off saying that I so appreciate everyone coming out, everyone taking the time to speak. This is such a great Demonstration of Democracy. People have done so much research and are so thoughtful. I also really want to appreciate the police chief, and members of the Police Department they also, several of us spent three hours there last Thursday and it was really helpful thing to be able to talk with you. And it was so gratifying to hear that after you went to the library event,

that you then responded with, hey I think there's some things we should look into more closely and I just really appreciate that responsiveness from city government departments. And I wanna call that out and say thank you for that I do have some questions for people. maybe, oh yes I can start with you. So I had some questions from folks we can just kind of go through them someone emailed saying are any of these cameras linked with other city cameras or private cameras at all? Or when you do a search, are you just querying the specific flock

I'm sorry, so the question is are we sharing or do other people have access to our cameras?

Just within Quincy. any other cameras like city cameras, traffic cameras or whatever? I know you can look at those too. But are they sort of connected so that when you search for flock, you've got the other city cameras or anything else? No, separate camera system. Separate, okay.

Yep.

I wanted to, if you had a slide of the first explanation for the reasons given I just wanted to look back at that.

You were looking for the one with the drop-down menu?

The drop down, yeah.

So that's the... That's one of them. So there's two dropdown menus, so there's the offense and then the reason for the search

Okay, so I guess it's the reason for this search.

That one there?

Yes. Okay, investigation of criminal offenses with reasonable suspicion that a criminal offense was committed.

So there's more to it that's just a screenshot of.

Yes, I know there's other ones. Okay. That seemed... sort of vague to me, like the investigation. But all of these fields are required so it would have to say the type of offense and then of course the type or case number We talked a little bit on Thursday, but maybe you can just tell everyone else. I had asked about case numbers if there's any way in the system to tie that case number that someone puts into an actual Case Number, and some of the oversight that... That we now require, that you have to

Yeah, so you see with the red asterisk. Everything with a red aesterisk is now required search criteria. So everything will have a legit is just more professional. And I know when you spoke about what people would write in there, the misconnection female, that was a drug investigation where they basically were waiting for the buyer who was a female buyer They basically missed her, so that's why they put that in there. That wasn't like stalking a woman and then the jizz, believe it or not was a person's nickname and that's Why that was there? It's not the most flattering nickname but that was a nickname

What about cleaning?

Oh, I'm sorry. So that's why we put the drop-down menu to kind of eliminate that, clean it up and make it more professional especially on the audit sheets and those are all posted. All our audit sheets are now posted on our transparency portal as well and everything has a case number now.

That's great. And when was that change made?

August 6th we implemented that. Again, we've been working with FLOC to update this and I know there were some conversations about with Boston. We control our system administrator, Lieutenant Jamie Green and Joe Pepjanovic, our IT chief. They set the parameters so I think what happened in Boston when they said they were sharing, somebody didn't set it properly. I think it might have been human error maybe from what I'm hearing on Boston side.

OK.

Human error from Boston or human error from FLOC?

Hearing from Boston. So basically we could, I went into the system today. I think I've been talking more to representatives from Flock than I have my family We were on a Zoom call today, and they were showing me just so I could speak somewhat intelligently tonight for you how we control our own settings in the software. And Flock can't go in and activate them or turn them on. accidentally went in our system, one of our two administrators and turned those permissions on. That would be a Quincy police error not a flock error.

Okay.

So it sounds like some of the reasons given in the past were nicknames or something, but some of them also seem like I am cool. Or just... sort of silly. So I think these are good changes that were put in. I guess I wanted to just say that while the case number is good to have, it sounded like there's no mechanism to determine that the case numbers actually a real case number or to check that it's there. but that comes in as it was explained, that there will be a monthly oversight. So let me just summarize what I think I understood from Thursday Flock itself has kind of flags, red flags. If someone is searching the car multiple times that could be a problem

for example, in some cases and other places that have been stocking. So they'll have some cases that it would be flagged. And then a captain would look at all of those every month ask the relevant person about what that was and then report to you on what they found. that's how you would deal with something like that. So there is a case number required, but the real oversight is maybe coming from both Flux flagging, and then also you're delving into these red flags.

Yeah so there's really two audits with Flux new for the automated auditing system. So I asked them today some of the things that would flag on FLOX audit, that would report to us that this might be suspicious and you want to look into it. Some things might be an officer running the same plate multiple times instead of because if you're looking for somebody, you just enter it into a hit list. So the same officer running the same place multiple times could to run it the same plate over a 30-day period, past a 30 day period. So I ran a plate today but I also ran it 35 days ago that might add some, that would flag searching outside cameras only, not our own internal network. So I was saying we're kind of selfish. We don't allow anybody to see our cameras

but we'll look at other people's cameras if they allow us to and so somebody is just looking at say I don't know where we have access some of the community that gives us access, they're just searching that camera. That would flag The same plate with different case numbers would flag, and there's a few other things. So we would get flagged by flock to have Captain Miller who is in charge of all detectives go through it We've had some flags. He brings the officer or investigator in, they're able to explain it to his satisfaction then we move on but he also does his own I mean he's in charge of all the detectives It's pretty much only detectives that have access to this system so he's gonna know if if that officer is not working on that case. So where we only have 70 something of them in the past 30 days, and that number's even gonna go down now a 14-day retention period. So he's able to look at it.

That's great, I appreciate those changes very much. I wanted to ask and I don't know if it was out yesterday but a recent Globe, kind of overview of how these things work. At the very end it said in July Salem announced it was ending its flock contract citing data security concerns but Salem isn't giving up on license plate readers. It plans to replace Flock with a system they say will offer greater local control of data. So do you know what they're going to be doing there?

Which department was that?

Salem.

I'm sorry, I'm having trouble here.

Oh, Salem?

Salem, yeah. Yeah, I did speak to the chief out there. You know a lot of municipalities are cancelling contracts with Flock, but they're not giving up on ALPR technology. So that's the thing. People are saying get the Flock out, get rid of Flock but replacing it with another technology and I know Salem did that I'm not sure which system he used. I know there's like an access system that ties into Genetech, I've actually spoken to Councilor Hubley about that but there's a lot of different options out there and again I'm standing up here as a flock apologist I'm a firm believer in the technology. I inherited Flock, it was here when I took over the Chief's job in 2023. I saw how valuable it was and I do take responsibility for expanding the program and some areas where we had some crime that we didn't have a camera in the area. So when we had a little extra money, we got some grant money.

We put some cameras in again strategically around the city but mostly at points of ingress and egress.

I think probably doesn't make sense to talk about it tonight, but maybe at a future time we should look into the money side of Flock because I've had a lot of comments and questions from people about how we paid for it, how much it costs the procurement process. But I wanted to if you don't mind I'll ask Gideon Epstein to come up and I wanted to... I wanted to ask, we've heard a lot of people say oh you know we have this technology in our pockets that just tracks us everywhere. Can you just very briefly go through how cell phones are different from flock?

That's a great question. So like you point out, law enforcement with a warrant in hand they can access People, Cell Phone, Location Information, CSLI. It's the kind of data that the Supreme Court contemplated in the Carpenter case in 2018 when they said for law enforcement to access people's historical location information derived from their cell site location information, law enforcement needs to get a warrant first. And that's fundamentally how license plate readers differ from this kind of collection of CSLI data and our team firmly believes that a warrant requirement enacted via state law would be the right thing. For example, the State Legislature could require any additions to hot lists compared against license plate reader data? that they obtain a warrant before adding people to a hot list.

And with the system like that, coupled with an extremely short data retention period for any data on people who are not on that hot list could theoretically have a license plate reader system that doesn't act like these flock cameras do as dragnet surveillance. But right now, that's all a hypothetical because there are none of those state guardrails in place.

Okay, thank you. So I guess then a sort of hypothetical question if As Mr. Fitzmaurice said, he was the one who worked at a biotech company and said that nothing was wireless and everything was very local. I guess I'm wondering if Quincy somehow had a system like that with 49 cameras would The legal issues be any different? I know the technology, you know there may even be fewer risks for security breaches but Would the ACLU, do you think still have those similar concerns?

Yeah. So if I understand your question correctly, if the Quincy Police Department were to contract with a different license plate reader vendor there may be some marginal benefits, but as a whole our team would still have a lot of serious concerns with this technology because fundamentally you wouldn't be shifting what the technology does. It would still be location tracking technology, tracking every single driver on roadways so that would give our team concerns regardless with that said we think Flock is in particular a very bad actor, that they're not a reliable law enforcement partner. So yeah there might be some marginal benefit from a different vendor but as a whole our team would absolutely still have concerns and there would absolutely be legal issues implicated I think they might differ in the sense that with some of these other systems, you may not be able to query external law enforcement's data. That might affect the scope of searches that courts then are subsequently analyzing So that might be how it differs from a legal standpoint.

Okay. I just now forgot what I was going to say. Okay, so there might be sort of better systems but all of these systems we've heard are concerning. Let's see. Oh, thank you. So maybe that's it for now. Thank you. I've just got questions all over the place. Chief, could I ask you to come back up again? I just realized one of my questions is in and then we'll try to move on. So some people have talked about body cams for police officers. I've heard a number of people reach out to me about that,

What do you say to that, like the police are watching residents but are not allowing residents to kind of oversee what they're doing?

Yeah, and we just had contract negotiations. That was one of the things that we were asking for, and ultimately it didn't fly. I'm a big... I think that they show that our offices are doing a fantastic job. But I'll tell you that in Quincy we're very lucky, Very low use of force, very low injuries as a result of the use of forces. I know we spoke at that during the budget hearing. You know, I get far more letters of commendation about the things our officers are doing than I do are complaints, but when we do get complaints, we take them very seriously. Lieutenant Mike Duran is our professional standards lieutenant. We hold people accountable, we hold them to a high standard and when people step out of line we have no issues retraining them.

We have suspended people and we've cut ties with people too, so I would be a proponent of body cameras. I know it's a huge expense but I would have no problem getting them. It's more of a union issue, unfortunately.

There's a bit of a parallel there so it's a good force though the problems are small I think the people would also say that about, you know, the crime rate maybe in Quincy and maybe that cameras You know, they're sort of like the police union maybe. Like we were doing okay without them but that's just what popped in my head.

Yeah no I would welcome them.

Yeah. I'm also just curious about whether you keep any data on the demographics of the people, the searches that you do like are we somehow doing more searches on certain types of people or anything like that? Is there any data

No. I'm sure we could pull up when an arrest was made, some demographics there. But essentially, we're looking for vehicles. That's it. There's talk that there is facial recognition in these cameras. It's capturing a picture of a vehicle. It's not capturing pictures of people there was no facial recognition in the ALPR cameras You know what we're not looking at people were looking at vehicles, so That's it

And do you have any data or experiences on the misreads? So we've heard about some of the mistakes that can happen.

Yeah, it's in our policy too that you don't rely just on the ALPR hit and as I said, that was a clear day. Sometimes in inclement weather or at night you don't get as clear a picture so it takes a lot more work but we don't Yeah, there's been cases where maybe it was New Hampshire 123 ABC. and it popped up in a Massachusetts alert. So we haven't had any issues where an officer has stopped the wrong vehicle based on just the ALPR because that's not for justification. They would have to do a little more research, make sure the vehicle is still wanted. They confirm the plate. They don't just go off of an ALPL plate.

When we spoke on Thursday, I raised the possibility of kind of an advisory board of residents. Can you talk about that, your openness or whatever to that here a little bit?

Yeah. As I told you, I welcome an opportunity to talk to anybody about this. I'd sit down and talk to anybody. If there's people in the community that are experts, I'm more than welcome to sit down. My daughter Ainsley reminds me I make four mistakes before breakfast every day So I have no problem listening to people who are a lot smarter than me. In terms of like an actual board, I think that would be under the purview of the Mayor to work on creating that but if you wanted and we could sit down and talk to people who know more about it, and I'll bring in my team. So as you've seen, we're not afraid to make changes when we realize when we realize we have some identified risks, we change and add safeguards.

I think that's really fantastic, and that really fosters trust in the police department here. and I think a lot of what I'm hearing is people are concerned, very, very concerned as you've heard tonight. I'm not hearing so much concern about the police force but just and other entities accessing data. And we do live in this current world where Laws are not always, the Constitution is not always prioritized. So anyway, thank you very much for your openness.

Pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor McKee. Any other councillors? Councillor Ash did you want to?

Through you Mr. Chair, actually Mr. Ross if I could just ask you one quick question I believe you said there was five or so studies and there was one that you would consider robust, rigorous? Yeah. I don't think I got the name of that study if you know it. If not, I can get it after.

I believe it's a gentleman Mortgos and Adams, Ian Adams two famous criminologists, a fairly rigorous study. I think largely they found that Flock was effective at deterring and solving motor vehicle thefts and arrests for motor vehicle I think the decrease in motor vehicle theft was only about 10%. And I think property crime is like around 5%, so fairly modestly sized. To my knowledge, there's no rigorous studies that have shown that it decreased violent incidents or violent crime, or arrests of violent crime on average. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence.

Thanks. I just wanted to see if I could get the name of that, so I appreciate it. Thank you. Chief, I did have some questions. I know we had a great meeting on Friday I actually did not have time in my own schedule, not yours. You're very gracious and open with your time as always but due to my own Schedule, I didn't...I wasn't able to stick around for the actual the search that we were going to, then I think that you offered to everybody that came in to meet with you. So I wanted to ask some questions about that if that was possible. That may be helpful if we could pull up... Was this on the screen?

Yeah, which one would you like?

Oh I'm sorry Chief. Your flock search screen.

Of the vehicle with the actual picture of the car?

Yeah we'll just start at the beginning so i think the first the the car is the end in my packet Okay. So with respect to, I know the red asterisks are fields that have to be filled out. With respect to offense type and say reason is there any kind of a tree or chart to make sure that those two fields have to agree with each other? So I'll give you an example. If somebody fills, if one of the officers checks the box for arson, but then say the reason is investigation with respect to human trafficking. Is that still a searchable If those fields all together, is that still a search that would go through?

Would it bounce back because if somebody's investigating an offense type of arson there really wouldn't be much, unless of course extenuating circumstances which I'm sure is not an anomaly here but with respect to a human trafficking investigation they probably wouldn't select arson as the offense type.

Right. No, I get what you're saying and I think that's something that would come up during the audit with the detective captain. He would notice that and it could just be and Human Era, that happens. On drop-down menus you think you're clicking one, you hit the other one and we're all human, we make mistakes so I think that would come up during the monthly audit with Captain Miller.

and the case number, that number you know my question actually when we met was whether that had to correlate to say a criminal number so like Quincy District 26 CR whatever it may be but that number is internal for investigative purposes, obviously because not every investigation becomes or leads to charges that are actually brought by the Department of the Commonwealth. But those case numbers, they don't necessarily have to be open Investigations, or you would put in an open investigation but the system does not check it in the background to make sure that that investigation correlates to an actual open incident?

So, no. Every time we enter any type of call into our computer-aided dispatch Thank you very much. but if it's an open investigation, so sometimes like our drug control unit might be looking at something. They might be watching a target location and they haven't generated a case number yet. So that was one issue that we're trying to address, that now we're going to have them basically come up make a case they could just put it in under drug investigation and then later on, put in the target location because a lot of that thing, it's clandestine until they actually make the arrest. If that makes sense, I don't know if

No, it does.

That's sort of where it gets a little tricky with the drug control unit. They don't want to enter a call for... whatever, some house on Main Street and then possibly blow their investigation because it's going to show up on the journal.

leave Main Street out of this. I'm sorry? I said, leave Main street out of it. Not Quincy Pointe. My next question chief and I think this might get to kind of the crux in overarching a theme of all the questions that we've received, and all of the people that we talked to, that spoke today, is the reason box or search field there. The first one reads investigation of criminal offense with reasonable suspicion that a criminal offense was committed. You know, determining the reasonability, I think goes to the issue that people have with ALPRs in general because usually you would if it was a search warrant of course you would go to a judge who would determine whether to issue that warrant and whether that warrant

was reasonable, or whether that set of facts under those set effects in lights most favorable to the Commonwealth if that set affects could lead to a reasonable suspicion, a criminal offense was committed. Now I know department-wise you've got 47 or 48 officers with access the system and of course given their trajectory, their training, their expertise, their skill they likely know what amounts to reasonable suspicion but outside of and Audit internally, how do we know that? And I don't know if we...I guess that's kind of the overarching issue or concern. and I guess with respect to different offenses, there could potentially be different levels of reasonable suspicion.

So what it really comes down to is they're a legitimate law enforcement reason to conduct the search of our system for a specific vehicle. That's what it comes down to, so I'm not naive. I understand that what happens in other parts of the country and in other communities where officers have misused this technology reflects on all of us, right? What happens in Minneapolis dictates how people feel about the police in Quincy. I understand that. and the bottom line is in our new policy that we adopted with guidance from the Mass Major City Chiefs Association, basically the last two pages of our new policies spells out the potential crimes that you can and would be charged with if you did use this technology inappropriately. So, I mean it's a pretty compelling statement in terms of offices if you're going to misuse this technology, you're gonna be discovered and you're risking your career and your pension.

I don't see our people doing it. We've done an audit back in January before we even had the training in March. We didn't find anybody misusing the technology, we did a spot audit of September of 2025 pulled a few cases and we basically found that all the searches made were for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

and I mean, I believe department wise in department wide that I can't imagine a world in which certainly the officers that I've trusted with QPD, and that would be the actual case. But I almost feel bad because then the questions are the questions that I likely would have had answered, had I been able to stick around on Friday. But I think that the with respect to those cases, although they're specific direct questions. They kind of go to the overarching issue that the public is facing and that we've heard about is there is a level of discretion that you're afforded with the utmost precaution. Each of us is still afforded some level of discretion, and we need to weigh kind of that discretion with the intended benefits. I know we spoke about a potential audit, of course you can't really

do a third party audit because they're open criminal cases, which I didn't even think of when I asked you that quite frankly. But I guess I'll end with a question which we did speak briefly about on when I came in to meet with you, with these precautions added in. So with the closed network, with a two-week timeframe instead of a 30 day timeframe with all of the second party authentication, all of kind of answers and the things that you've thought on your own as a department. As certainly a department that prioritizes the city, its members, public safety. With all of those precautions added in say, and with other municipalities who are rescinding their contracts. We talked about the example if Braintree cancels their contract and somebody goes over the train tracks

Do we still benefit from ours? And are you still getting that intended benefit given the precautions that you're implementing due to the public nature of some of these issues?

Yeah, we're still getting the benefit. We're still using Quincy cameras to solve Quincy crimes. One of the things now if Braintree is working on something and they believe the suspect came into Quincy We would work with them. We work with our partner law enforcement agencies all the time that this is no different just because we've restricted and we no longer give anyone else access to our network will still help and work with they'd work with us too. So if they restricted our access to their cameras, I know Chief Murag and Randolph closed his network as well and if we had an incident where we were tracking somebody to Randolph, our detectives would call over there. We would put it in writing and give them what we were working on and I know they would work with us just as we would work Thank you. And the hit list is still huge, so if we had... I mean, we had a stolen car.

We were getting our drug control unit to drive non-traditional police vehicles and they get alerts a lot with these stolen cars. So, they were able to kind of set up on it. And I know I sent something to the council, I think it was back in June or July. They got a hit list on a stolen motor vehicle that came in. They were able locate it on Granite Street, they were able to kind of sit on it, wait for the people who stole the car to come back to the car. And as they did, they observed somebody taking a rifle out of his pants and basically they had masks They had rifles, extended magazine ammunition clips and they were about basically we think either about to do a home invasion or an armed robbery. So that was a hit list of vehicle came in stolen car there was no pursuit There was some Scottish soccer fans there that were applauding as the police made the arrest, but the Tartan Army was in Quincy. So it is still beneficial.

Is this, okay. No and we discussed a number of cases that you're obviously at liberty to discuss because they'd reached a certain point and I appreciated all the background it's just very good presentation, great meeting and thank you to everybody that is here to answer the questions. I guess I'll end with whose license plate did you say was this on QPD 2?

That's our Lieutenant Steve O'Donoghue.

Okay.

He put that whole presentation together for me.

Ask Lieutenant O'Donohue how to get from Bergen to Hancock Parkway in two minutes and six seconds. Because I would love to know. No, thank you very much. Thanks, Chief. Thank you.

Any other councillors? Thank you, Chair.

So first I want to thank everyone coming to the meeting, especially residents that come up to speak. It's really showed how democracy works so... and then I want to thank Chief Kennedy, QPD and all the guests. My major concern is I think a lot of people also express this concern from their speech, from the email we got is many concerned about what a flag company can do with our data. Because this technology was developed by the company, so they know much better how this technology can be used to analyze data, get search share. And I think we talked about that before

and since this company has been reported multiple times not not honest about what they are doing. So I have this concern, so actually my next question is to Mr. Epstein . Thank you. So according to your team research, what What the company can do with those data and what they have done something they didn't report. and so also I know the technology is still developing.

So they can have a new feature, a new function which like Law enforcement don't know but once they get the data, they can do different analyze. So I just want to share knowledge about what the company can do our data and the case they have misused that data?

Yeah, good question. So I think looking at the Boston Police Department example, I think it is a fair assessment to say that it was human error but I think our perspective is that it seems likely human error on Flock's end because the Boston Police Department and other local elected officials had clearly unambiguously indicated to Flock that they did not want Boston's data shared externally There was even contract language to that effect, which runs counter to Flock's standard template contract language granting it the right to share data externally. Boston's lawyers took note of that and they amended flock standard contract language to hopefully ensure that flock would not share their data externally. But it went ahead and did so anyway, our assessment of why they did so is because at that time, all of Flock's new customers were automatically opted into nationwide data sharing.

And I think that is true The Quincy Police Department's experience with Flock at the time it entered a contract with the company. So by default, Flock is sharing its customers' data externally I recognize it's now taken some steps to try to put control over data back in the hands of local police departments, but I would ask why those safeguards were not implemented from the get-go and ultimately it matters a lot what the default data sharing settings are that Flock has in place now and had in place for many years before this point. And I think separate from automatic data sharing, there's the ongoing reality, even with this quote unquote closed off system that Flock could receive a subpoena or another request from the federal government to share Quincy data. And there is no language in the contract to communicate that it shared Quincy data with the local police department as much as we might hope that they would do so.

That risk remains regardless of these changes to data sharing.

My second question is I rather like a flock. Sometimes they just change the contract by themselves, like silently don't tell the customer and Customer, who will everyday keep watching them? So that's a concern. Could you talk some about those case?

Absolutely. It's a really important point to understand, so not only is there the contract problem of Flock granting itself a license to retain communities data and potentially share it externally, certainly use that data to train its AI models there is the separate issue of FLOC repeatedly and unilaterally making updates to its terms and conditions without giving notice or an opportunity to object to the local police department, its clients, its customers or local elected officials. So basically FLOC can change language that dictates how data might be shared, how data may be used without giving notice or an opportunity to object to local leaders and it's repeatedly done so. My colleagues at ACLU National have documented a number of these changes if you do a little bit of research into this question.

Thank you.

I'd rather like for our company also have a light about say working with ACLU. and could you give some case of that? They said they partner with ACLU but turns out it's not true.

Yeah, we don't partner with Flock.

What?

We do not partner with Flock.

Okay, that's my question. Thank you. I want to make three simple points about FLOC. So FLOG has been caught repeatedly giving misleading or inaccurate information to the public and government officials about its own technology and data practices. This is important because Flock is not just a user of this technology. They created it, they operated the platform They understand what the technology can do and how the data can be searched, analyzed, and shared better than most law enforcement agencies do.

So if we can't trust the company to be truthful about its own technology, why should we continue to put our residents' private information into his hands? Second, if the administration cancels FLOG and simply moves to another ALPR company it needs to clearly understand what that company can do with the data. what the legislative guardrails are and the water protections that are in place. There needs to be a robust public debate in the City Council approval before we jump from one ALPR company to another. Third, ultimately it's about what the American people want. Do people really want this level of surveillance in their lives?

America was designed around a balance of power between the government and the governed. When the balance become more and more tilted toward the government, people will naturally feel uneasy. And today you already see it. The government can say just trust me But remember, trust only exists on level ground. When one side has overwhelming power over the other It is no longer trust, it is domination and submission. In my recent visits back to China, I saw cameras everywhere and point from all directions. You may think that's safe.

No one can steal my car anymore, but the premise is you don't say anything that displaces the government So one time when I was chatting with my friend at a restaurant, I accidentally mentioned the Chinese president Xi's name. The topic wasn't even about him, but just the name itself sent my friend into an electric shock. She immediately stopped me, carefully look around and looked up. She was afraid we would be accused of criticizing the president So now when we discuss the flock and mass surveillance, it reminds me vividly of her scared expression. I know America has not reached that level, but watch out.

Don't sleep in that direction. If you want to remain free citizens you have to protect the balance of power. So by saying that, I propose even though I know we can't vote today but I want to propose First, City of Quincy should immediately terminate all the contracts with Flock Company and taking down all the Flock cameras. Second, if the city wants to contract with another ALPR company should have city councils approve and they have a robust public discussion.

This is my proposal, thank you.

Thank you. I do want to thank everyone for being here, I know it's getting late so I won't repeat all of that but I do think that Councilor Jacobs did a good job of putting together a format and assembling a group of people that provided a wide range of expertise just a couple of comments, observations. I was really glad to hear about all the improvements Chief Kennedy that have been made When we know better, we do better. Right? And so I think it's great that we've tightened this up. I think It was wonderful that I didn't hear one citizen criticize the department and the use of, you know there were no officers accused or criticized in any way like we've heard in the news from some other departments. So I think For me and for a lot of people that I've talked to, I don't think it's the implementation of this technology in the city of Quincy that causes people concern. I think it is the technology itself

and I'll just say that six months ago, I had never heard of Flock. I wish I could go back to that time but the emails started coming in, the news reports started coming out and now we've all had to become experts on this. A couple of things, though, because I have talked to a lot of citizens. I want to make sure people understand Flock is a brand License Plate Reader Cameras, the one that's implemented here in the City of Quincy. There are other brands so when certain communities have said they've cut their ties with Flock, they may not have cut their tides with another license plate reader company and the other thing I've mentioned to people is that not every camera they see mounted on a pole is a flock camera. There are many other cameras, traffic cameras in use cameras on private buildings, commercial buildings. So not every camera you see is a flaw camera. You know I do have some concern about the cloud storage with AWS

the wireless cameras, I hope that we can keep an eye on Flock and what they're doing. You know, my experience I did see in the Globe. I think it was yesterday's Globe there was a great article and there was quote from Michael Bradley, the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Chief of Police Associations and he said, sometimes the technology gets out in front of the policy. In my experience with technology that's always the case right? The technology we you know Mark Zuckerberg famously said we like to move fast and break things That's the world that technology companies travel in. They don't ask for permission, they'd rather ask for forgiveness. They're always trying to sort of leapfrog over the other competitors So I think it's the technology that causes concern, and I use the example of 23andMe. There were plenty of people who thought it was a great idea to have their blood drawn and do DNA profiles.

And some of them found out they had relatives they didn't know about or whatever, but then that company went belly up and the only thing they really had, the company had left was their data because data collection and aggregation is in itself the world, the business that we're in right now. and everybody is working to try to be ahead of that curve. I would say, I think if every law enforcement agency had the kind of controls that Quincy has now implemented, it might put Flock out of business because they really are relying on that data aggregation and the data sharing because the other thing too is eventually all of the grant monies and and so I would like to say just a couple of

Suggestions as we move this forward with whatever happens. I think that having metrics of the cases that it's used for, the numbers that are solved, that might not be easy to quantify specifically because It's obviously just one part of an investigation, but being able to quantify that I think would be helpful. I think we're going to need to have regular cost-benefit analysis because like I said, eventually the money will run out and this will be costly for the city to maintain. I would like to see that there's an Explicit Review prior to the auto renewal of all these contracts. It seems like if you don't opt out with 30 days before, then it automatically renews. Never a great thing whether it's a subscription service, all of a sudden it hits your credit card and go oh God I forgot to cancel that and this was touched upon a little bit to evaluate any changes in the terms of use and how they're communicated from the vendor, it sounds like maybe not all that well.

Because as we know whenever we access an app on our phone that maybe we haven't used in a while You've got to log in again because they want you to scroll through a brand new terms of use. Click that you accept it like anybody reads it, right? You just click through it. So I would like to see any changes in terms of as well as any software updates are explicitly evaluated so that we know what we're getting ourselves into. And I think that was all I had. I and again, like has already been mentioned it would be nice if the state legislature would take this up so that each municipality isn't having to Sit here and go through all of this and make these decisions because, you know, then you drive over the Ponce River Bridge and you're in Boston. You drive The other way and you're in Braintree, it does seem that there needs to be some state level guidance that would be helpful for this. But I do thank you all for being here tonight.

Any other questions? Councilor Ryan, hold on.

First of all, I want to say thank you to everybody who came and shared all of their knowledge and asked questions and gave answers. Thank you very much. I do have a couple of questions for Chief Kennedy. So the first question that I have, Chief, is how many flock cameras do you have? Forty-nine. Forty nine.

Fortty-nine flock and there's one... I should take that back. We have 50 flock cameras, 49 of them are ALPR one of them is not ALPR. It's called a Condor camera and it's like a live streaming camera

Okay, so 50 cameras because according to a recent FOIA request what was reported were 62 cameras. Can you explain the difference?

Yeah, I was talking to Councilor Yuan about that. I don't know where that number came from. We've never had more than 49 ALPR cameras so I'm not sure exactly you know where they came from or where the misinformation there was

Okay, all right. The second question that I had was on your hot list. What's the retention period for your hotlist?

So basically whatever... as long as it stays in the hot list. As long as that vehicle is still wanted, it's going to stay in there. I think it updates every... I believe it updates like every six hours but that's nationwide, the hotlist

So that means that if a case is not solved, that hot list, that specific case number stays in there.

Yeah and that's been an issue we've identified with the hot list because Sometimes the person who puts it in is supposed to be responsible for taking it out. So that's why we never rely just on a hot list hit because it might have been a stolen car that was reported that was never taken out of the hot list. So, that's why offices if they do get hit on something that they have to verify that the vehicle or person is still wanted.

Do you ever do a data review on these hot lists to make sure that it's updated in a timely fashion?

No, I know talking to the vendor just this afternoon they said that they're updated but again, that's nationwide. It could be somebody wanted for a homicide in Albuquerque and it would pop up if they entered the city of Quincy that this person was wanted for homicide somewhere

Could you walk me through a system update with your vendor? So I'm sure that there's some updates on the programming for the ALPRs.

In terms of our portal? Yeah. I'd be the wrong guy to talk to about that. Lieutenant Green, Jamie Green, has been handling that. He works... almost weekly, I think with the team there. He has a Zoom call like once a week with two of our flock reps and he sort of basically the system that I showed you, this looks completely different than it used to look. So Jamie's been working on that and it's still a work in progress with the drop downs we never had the drop-downs and the required for the case number. So he's been working with the engineers at Flock to kind of redesign our search fields

Okay, so once they updated it to provide more clarification on cases was there a quality check done to make sure that it worked correctly?

Like the audit feature, I'm not following.

The audit feature and actual cases. So did you put in a dummy case number to see if it would come up or if you could create it?

They wouldn't know. Flock wouldn't know if our case numbers were different or wrong. That's for our internal audit that Captain Miller does once a month. that he would recognize that that case number is off. The Flock AI audit, would pick up if it was two different case numbers for the same vehicle search, that would flag and there might be a reason for it but the officer or the detective would have to come in and explain why they were two different cases and looking for the

Okay, and you had just mentioned audit. Do you have an audit process in place?

We do so Captain Mike Miller he's in charge of our detective bureau He audits every month in addition to the AI audit that Flock just created. So they audit our stuff for those, some of the items that I mentioned earlier that would flag and then Captain Miller does his own

Okay. And what happens if he finds something questionable? What's the process?

Yeah, it's not an office you want to go into but he's called people in and they've been able to explain What happened? Like we talked about with the, you know, somebody put jizz in the search field and they were able to, that's how I knew that that situation was the street name of an individual in a drug investigation.

And do you keep an ongoing log of these audit issues?

Yeah, Captain Miller does and he sends me an email explaining that he conducted an audit and what he found. He gives that monthly So there is, like I said our searches are down so it's not incredibly time consuming. The one thing that I was talking to some of the councilors and I talked to Captain Miller about it. If anybody wants to come in and actually watch him conduct an audit, you might be a little bored but you're more than welcome to come and actually do it. And we could set that up if that's something anyone wanted to do as representatives of of the citizens of this city, you're more than welcome to come in and check our math.

I might take you up on that.

Any time.

And let me see if I have any other questions. So, have you recently received any requests from any of the agencies for access to our data?

No, no not that I know of unless a I was a little too quick to say no. I'm not sure if somebody if another agency was looking actually recently Boston I think we were We were helping Boston out with a homicide investigation where one of the suspects came into Quincy. So we were working with Boston, but any time we were going to do a search for an outside agency, we would have them put that in writing to us and ultimately Captain Miller would approve or deny, or Lieutenant O'Donoghue or Lieutenant Coff on the two lieutenants who run that Bureau of Criminal Investigations. They would sign off on it.

Or deny it. and the last question that I have is, you had stated that the ALPR data is now a closed system. So that means that there's no federal agencies, no Homeland Security agencies that can gain access to your data. Correct?

That's correct, and we get a monthly email from Flock as well. I'd be happy to share that with you to confirm that no other agency has looked at our network. So I get that at the end of the month.

Okay, and that includes Flock too, right?

That's from Flock. Flock sent it to us to confirm our privacy settings.

Okay, okay. All right. Well, that's all the questions that I have. Thank you. Thanks.

Any other councillors like to speak? Councillor McKee, one last question.

I thought incorrectly. So thank you, I have a very bad voice tonight so I apologize. Thank you very much for everybody being here and asking all the questions. I especially think the Chief and his force being here Chief, I have a couple of questions for you. I won't be able to talk for too long.

Wait for me to sit down.

I know, I did. I didn't want you to sit Down. Councilor Jacobs just didn't recognize me. So I think you just explained that when What does actually closed mean? You know, with the current inbound sharing permissions and outgoing search permissions and dated history of changes. Who can change that? Is it just your internal staff that can change it if they wanted to change it to be open?

who can change it. Lieutenant Green has been the one working with Flock, and we were on a Zoom call earlier, and he kind of shared his screen on the Zoom call, and they were kind of walking him through, okay go to that box, check this, check privacy go down to here you can see, you can confirm that your sharing is off. The network sharing the nationwide sharing and just confirming kind of walking through so I had an idea like I said I've never used the system. I've worked in a unit that used Flock So this is all sort of new to me as well.

Can it be turned on and off? And would you know if it was turned on or off?

Yeah, it's just like a toggle switch. they believe happened in Boston that it might have been operator error that somebody toggled it on.

And I'm just trying to reiterate that because it is human error, it's an operating... I'm so sorry, I shouldn't even be here. I hope I'm not getting everybody's, it's just a cold. I'm asking that because that's preventing our data from being shared. But if we get a subpoena or if somebody from outside, the federal agency comes and asks for it who makes a decision as to whether or not that gets shared?

So when we talk about sharing, like if Braintree was working on an investigation and they wanted access to our data We would not give them access to the data. We would do the search for them if it met our parameters, but we wouldn't like toggle that on and allow somebody else access to our camera systems.

So FLOC doesn't have any access to yours if it's shut off? It's shut-off, correct. And then I think I was understanding where Councilor Ash was going but I wanted to ask a couple of questions concerning an active criminal investigation cannot be released publicly, correct?

In active criminal investigation, no.

But if I'm not asking that they be released publically what specific law prevents a qualified independent auditor operating under a confidentiality agreement and appropriate security requirements from reviewing flock access logs in determining whether search is compiled with the department policy.

The question is, we could have an independent auditor? If we absolutely could. if that's something the administration wanted. Right now, I think we're doing it. We're open to like I said anyone coming in and watching

It's not about us having an independent auditor. What specific law would prevent a qualified, independent auditor operating under a confidential agreement. And I'm sorry, because it's coming out really bad.

No, I think I get what you're saying. I don't believe there's a law I was just saying, I never said there was a law that wouldn't allow an independent audit to come in and do it. I just said operationally I wouldn't be comfortable having somebody come in and look at active investigations. But you're right, I don't believe there's a law that would prohibit it.

I think that's one of the concerns. So an outside auditor cannot see an underlying case information. Can the department provide an independent auditor with a redacted or de-identified Audit Log containing the officer's date, search justification case numbers and verification. Is there some other way that we can if you had to have that audit that was coming in is another way that could protect the data?

No, and again I'm open to other ideas. Like I said this is a work in progress for us. that we recognized that we needed to clean some things up. We've been working for a year on this, to clean things up and get it to where I'm pretty comfortable that I can stand up here that we're using this appropriately and that we have guardrails in place now. if that's another thing that the council would like, we could certainly look towards having an auditing company come in on a confidentiality agreement and check our math. I have no problem with that.

So one of the things I have a concern with, and it's really just general about this is that it's not the Quincy Police. I hope you know that I don't think it's the Quin- You can put all the safeguards you can put into it but this is a private company and although you have it shut off and they're changing, and they are changing really rapidly now because throughout not just the state of Massachusetts but throughout the country people are pulling the plug on Flock. So you know that their company is gonna try to salvage anything they can because their data is there future right? So they're going to tell you all the things you want to hear. They can put those safeguards into place, but they can change at any time and that's one of my concerns that I have with walkers because they might be meeting with them every week on Monday and that guy you're meeting with is a good guy but whoever's making the decisions at Flock are not making the decision that are best for potentially people. And you said it yourself earlier, when you learned about some of this stuff, you were concerned about it. I mean, it's concerning. But at the same time, I absolutely understand the tool that you have at your hands

and I don't wanna take away any tools from you, but I do have concerns about... And I know you don't think it's surveillance, but it's not necessarily the Quincy police that are surveilling people. It's block of the organization Connection. Do we also use ring doorbells potentially for when you have a situation like a stolen car in the neighborhood? Because I know you don't have vlog cameras in every neighborhood, but you do that too as well, right?

Do we do what? I'm sorry.

Use ring doorbells or the connection for ring door bells, is that another way you use technology to be able to solve crimes?

Yeah, I mean if we have an incident our detectives go around and request from residents if they see Ring cameras or another brand. they'll request footage. We've also done search warrants to get video evidence from people's Ring cameras or Nest cameras, or whatever they have so yeah it's just another tool that that we use in an investigation.

So I have one other question. Flock has said there's never been a data breach, right? Have they ever had a data bridge?

I mean, I would defer to these gentlemen here. I don't believe so. When I say data breach, I'm not sure but I know that in our contract the city of Quincy owns the data. Flock, as it was brought up does have a license to use- Your contract recently?

So did you renegotiate your contract because originally your contract didn't

No, I believe I sent them all out the contracts and it was mentioned earlier today that we know the city of Quincy owns the data. I am not aware of any instance where FLOC has sold the municipality's data.

So it's not so much that Quincy owns the data, we don't hold the data on a server here in Quincy,

No, it's in the AWS system and then it's deleted which will be... It was after 30 days permanently deleted. And I know we had an incident where One of our detectives had called out there. He was looking for a plate from like 32 days ago, and they basically told him it's gone. We don't have it. Even if you get a warrant... It's been permanently deleted. And again, they don't have registry access. They have a picture of a vehicle and a plate. They don't know whose car that is.

I understand So actually on September 22nd, there was a security notice that was delivered. It was a delayed disclosure that was deliberate from Flock the company. Flock noticed previously shared third party mapping vulnerability was reported on November 20, this is September 22nd, 2026. Reported in November 2025 and they supposedly fixed it in December of 2025. The September 2026 notice described the publication of device names, locations and types obtained in late 2025. Flock said it had no indication of unauthorized access of use. As Flock to produce the original notice in supporting timeline distinguishes discovering vulnerabilities from confirming exploitations So what I'm saying here is that they, Flock said on the dates that we first learned about the vulnerability, they said it wasn't shared.

Then it was shared in a third party so at first they said nothing ever happened and then it was actually shared. This is the company We're putting all our eggs in the basket for you. You might have it closed, but just recently shut it off is what I'm saying. So last year there was a breach and they didn't even tell the organizations until September 22nd, 2026 this year. That's when we found out.

I'm not aware of that.

Yeah, thank you. So every organization should have gotten this email. I got this email This is why I'm bringing it up. I'm not trying to gut you, it's really just an eye opening to what the company is doing So although as I'm sitting here and I'm hearing, and I don't want to take any tools away from anybody to be able to do your jobs. But what I get afraid of is what that tool was being used for outside of what this is being used. It might be closed here, but you just closed it as of August and then a whole year after it was shared the data breach happened because there's so much eyes on them right now, they're having to actually come up with the truth. And this is supposedly something... They are a technology company and this is something that we're using for crime prevention but they're actually not being honest with us about what they're doing. So it's kind of, it's just very confusing in that sense when you're looking at that and the data. And when you think of the data, you're just thinking of his license plates but it could be a million other things that you look at that.

So when you think of a license plate, I don't memorize people's license plates, I also know we get a lot of strange emails A lot of letters in the city of Quincy. People are telling me that their license plates, that people alter their license plate. I'm sure you have heard that too, right? I'm not going to alter my license plate because I wouldn't have any benefit to do that. But, that's a whole other issue so that LPR reader wouldn't be able to actually help you in that situation correct? If the license plate was altered you wouldn't like they put spray paint on the plate or something.

Yeah, I've heard of different things and they've been doing it for years when they started doing ALPR toll collection on the highways people. That's really when they started doing it.

So everybody's going to try to scheme the system is what I'm trying to say, like even like I don't want to pay my toll booths so I'm not gonna...I'm gonna do this so I'd have to pay the toll but really when I look at this and I'm talking about The data breach, what I was really bothered by this is that what they can't... This is throughout the whole country. I'm not saying it's just Quincy. It's throughout the WHOLE COUNTRY. We have 50 cameras. We don't know if any of our, you know we just secured it, we just shut off that Boston by accident had it open and we had it opened before that too. We do not know if our data has been taken or what is being done with. and that's what the scary part of this is. And I know it's just license plates, that's we're saying but we don't know what that connection is. We don't if the federal government comes in and says we're coming to do a sting on X, Y and Z and they're gonna demand your info from what I understand and I could be wrong the federal government comes in and asks something from Quincy. Can you say, no we don't want to share that information for you? the federal government comes into Quincy, like the state that Quincy is Quincy.

The state comes in to Quincy the federal come it comes into the state if they come in and say that we want your data are you going to say no we don't share with you

No, it would depend on what they were investigating. Certainly if we have another, God forbid a Boston Marathon bombing or something like that and they come in and want to look at our data, we are not going to cooperate if they're looking at people's immigration status, we can't. We talked about the Protect Act earlier. We don't cooperate with federal immigration authorities. We can't by law. By law? talking in a hypothetical situation, if the DEA is doing a drug investigation at Quincy we're gonna work with them. If the FBI's coming in and doing a human trafficking case We're going to work with them, but we are going to be the ones controlling. We're not flipping a switch and letting them take over our network.

One would hope you wouldn't be able to, but that's I think the thing people are really afraid of really, it is not the local people who are doing things. This is not about the local Quincy Police Department. It is about the changes in the way that way people are utilizing this data and the way the companies are sharing information and how cozy everybody's getting with that data, and where it's going from. And I think when you listen to what people are talking about and the sense that we are, that's the surveillance that people are talking about. And it's no different than anything else that we talk about like when you talk about cell phones but we actually more secure on our cell phones than we are with the LPI. I could be wrong about that, I'm going to ask a gentleman from UCL... I do really appreciate everything that you guys are doing because it's not easy being a police officer in 2026.

So I guess when you were talking earlier about cell phones, we were talking about that and I was just talking about data breaches. It's a pretty big thing to me that you get notified that Flock, this was last year that this happened and they didn't notify anybody until September 22nd of this year. and they're telling people, you should look to see if anything was breached on your side. Why should I be looking for my side if it was breaching? Shouldn't they be telling me if it's breached? I'm just asking that because isn't this the whole reason why we're all sitting up here talking about this? Because we don't have control of it, even if we shut it off. We don't really have control over it. Could you enlighten me on that?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think another city councilor and another Massachusetts community recently said if it was so neat and tidy, I don't think communities across the country would be talking about these issues. There are definitely things that local police departments can do that are steps in the right direction, but ultimately it's this private company that controls the data not necessarily municipalities and that's something that could be different with other license plate reader vendors. a really important point. This whole conversation is not supposed to be a zero sum game, where either you take away tools from the police department entirely.

It shouldn't be punishing, this is what it feels like. It feels like what's happening is that we're bringing up our chief who's doing an exceptionally great job and grilling him in his department saying, this is bad. This is bad." And that's not really what we're saying. What we're seeing is it's a pretty big problem because it's not just here in Quincy. It's throughout the whole country, really throughout the world but it's really this and I understand where The Chief is coming from by saying He takes, he doesn't believe it's surveillance. But it is in the bigger picture of what the company's using it for is what I think the problem is and there's no guardrails We might have policies and guard rails on them here in Quincy but we don't have them in the state or the federal government is that, that's the biggest problem right?

That's exactly the biggest problems. You know we're not totally in control of our municipalities data and any community across Massachusetts in the absence of these guardrails and also just want to say your point about data vulnerabilities and data breaches The way Flock gets around these issues is by defining data breaches in an extremely narrow way to the point where they won't be required to inform municipalities. But the reality is there have been a number of instances flock data has been vulnerable to external actors. And I'm not familiar with the case you're raising, but I'd certainly be interested in what's going on.

Well, I think...I'll be happy to share it with you. What I think is super interesting about it is that still today even though they sent out this notification municipalities that have flocks, that they didn't update their website to say that they had a breach. So even though they're communicating to the communities, they're not actually being honest about what they're telling you when you go to their websites

and they continue to attend city council meetings across the state, and inform local lawmakers that they've never had a data breach supposedly when there's information to the contrary all around us.

I mean, again, I'm not trying to scare anybody because this is and that's the other thing is like I think we believe Quincy is a very safe city. There are bad things that happen in Quincy though, because I don't want to make it seem like the police officers don't have to deal with anything. That's scary, because i don't wanna deal with what they have to do with and I know it's scary but at the same time, this is like a whole different type of scary because it's technology. It's data. It personalization. And we talk about those even when we talk We were just talking about elections just a couple weeks ago, about how you can tell how many ballots you have to have for Democrats or Republicans because we're getting more savvy with our data. and my private career was marketing communications. I bought data like that's what you did, you targeted it and you figured out who your audience was when you were doing those things that was back a long time. I can go the other way with you, Chief. That was 20-28 years ago and we would think we were really sophisticated because we weren't using analog anymore but it's amazing how much changes.

And I say to the kids that are growing up now, technology is changing faster than they can even keep up with. That's what we're dealing with and bad actors are everywhere. They're not just they're not just, you know, they're everywhere. It's no different than drugs. Drugs are everywhere. Everybody is susceptible to it. Bad actors are everywhere and there in the big corporations too and they're doing bad things with the stuff that we don't want them to do that with and that's our data what we're doing in the United States. It is scary, I mean, I understand like in other countries they have more risks and I want to be able to support anything that happens that we can help other communities with but what I get afraid with is it's not the Quincy police, it's the company. It's what they're using it for and that there's no, you can have as many guardrails as you want Chief, they have none and that's the problem, so thank you very much. I said I wasn't gonna talk long and I talked really long and just wanna say thank you to everybody. I'd ask all the rest of your questions but that's all I got for tonight, thank you.

So just to confirm, so there's a number of

of risks that we're worried about. Some of it is data breaches and some of it just legal civil liberties so If the city of Quincy ran its own system, that would still have these legal issues as you mentioned before. But it would probably be better in terms of data selling, et cetera. and so forth. I wanted to ask the Chief a couple of questions if you don't mind coming up. So, I wonder if you can tell... I know you're not saying exactly where the cameras are but this one Condor camera I don't know much about this but it saw a little thing, TV segment on it and it seems like it's the kind of camera that can move and track people as they're walking around.

No, no. That's a separate... The Condor camera is just basically like a live stream CCTV camera. I think what you're referring to is the the program, and I actually just found out about it today. There's nobody in Massachusetts that I'm aware of that uses it but the conduct camera is able to do this thing called a free form search where you could put in like female yellow dress, blue jeans or something and it would kind of scan. That's a separate thing those, the ALPR cameras, the 49 ALPR Cameras cannot be configured with that technology. So that's why I say our ALPR camera do not track people. The Condor Camera They used that. They turned it on in Providence after the Brown University shooting, and you might have seen the images of the guy, the suspect there walking around. That was with a Condor camera that Providence had

but our condor camera, and I'll be honest we have it up. We put it up on Rashudi Drive because we were getting a lot of issues with illegal dumping up there and it was really just trying to target Illegal dumping, speeding cars and that was pretty much it. But the real reason we put it up there was all the illegal dumping people going up there throwing mattresses and junk, working with the DPW. That's why we put it there. But we have only one of those.

Wouldn't an ALPR camera have been able to find that?

There's an ALP and a Condor camera in that area. Yeah, there's an ALPR I believe right down the bottom of the ramp as cars are getting off the highway.

OK. All right thank you so I think Councilor Ash put it really well that these issues are coming down to discretion. And so While we do have stricter controls, it still seems like there's a level of discretion. Again, like if even another community wanted to access or wanted Quincy to do a search There's discretion there, too. And maybe there just has to be in any kind of world where any number of things can happen. I guess my concern is what kind of oversight if, I know you're saying no immigration data but let's say some other federal agency had some query and

they put it in writing and an email. So there was a paper trail which would follow the new policy, and QPD determined that it was acceptable to them How might the public or, you know, the council know about something like that? Like how many searches are coming from... We don't know because it looks like it's all coming from within Quincy. is there any way to determine how many of those kinds of requests are coming in or where they're coming from? Yeah.

I'd have to do a deeper dive into that. Like I said, I'm not incredibly familiar. I don't know all the dropdowns. I dunno if there is one for outside agency assist. There might be. I could look into that and get back to you but any agency wanted our help, whether they're local state or federal partners. If it's a legitimate law enforcement reason and it reaches our parameters of what we find acceptable and is signed off on by a supervisor then we would absolutely work with are local, state and federal partners. We just wouldn't give them direct access or control of our system.

Okay. And then I just wondered about, really, I feel like when there's a warrant, there's definitely some outside Oversight or determination of what is acceptable, which I think to many of us would feel better. Just some outside check. would the QPD be willing to voluntarily you only do searches on using warrants, like when you have a warrant to search?

So right now it's not required under Massachusetts law. Decision is that currently, and it may change, that there is no expectation of privacy when you're on a public road in a vehicle with a license plate that you're required to display. So I don't even know if we went to Quincy District Court and tried to apply for a warrant that would probably throw us out of there. I don't know, but tying up the judge's docket with a warrant for something we don't need a warrant We're not there yet. And if the law changes, certainly we'll comply with the law. But right now we're in full compliance with Massachusetts law.

Okay. I guess, I'm still wondering about the number of cameras that Quincy has relative to other communities and not quite clear on why we do have so many and whether the QPD would be open to reducing that number if we're talking about still having any at all. could you deal with like other communities don't have as many, why do we have so many?

Yeah, I'll go back into it. We're a pretty large city. I pulled up some stats, 26 square miles, 226 miles of roadway and we have a number of points of ingress and egress in the city. And like, we talked about earlier just around the rotary, the Furnacebrook Rotary. There's a couple just right there so I don't...I'm not looking to get any more. I think we have our city pretty strategically covered and like we talked about before they're not you know when neighbours thought you know, they were in neighborhoods. They're not in residential neighborhoods. We're not watching people, we're not surveilling people and watching where they go to church or where they get their groceries it's points of ingress and egress in the city, and they're sort of strategically placed around. And that's just how we did it. I think we have some pretty good coverage

but as you saw with Lieutenant O'Donoghue's car, we got two plates. I don't know where he went after that. It's not like we're gonna follow him and track him all through the city.

Okay, thank you.

Good evening. Thank you. So I just am going to ask a few questions here. My first question is gonna be for Mr. Ross, May, I may not be able to answer this. It's more of just an inquiry that I have. You had mentioned or it had been mentioned that these cameras are are pretty inexpensive to run, considering all the things that they do. Even though it only kind of or majority of the cases that it solves a very low lying crime you know, stolen cars and maybe car accidents. Is there any evidence that like points to insurance companies or maybe trying to subsidize this? Because it is something that they can benefit from. So I just was wondering if there'd ever been any... Not that I'm aware of, no.

quite a bit of speculation based on the terms and agreements in most of the contracts that eventually they will convert the scans that they're taking into some sort of data product, whether that's anonymized or not. I think you gave the example of the cell phone companies. Before we had federal legislation on cell phones, you could just go buy cell phone data from data brokers. Like I had a colleague back 2014-2016 that had million something cell phone pings that they were linking up through police stations to identify cops and then tracking cop movements. They basically write a research paper on that We passed federal legislation on some of that stuff. And so most of the data brokers now anonymize that data, but you can still go buy it like I have some that I used for research purposes. It's anonymous, you know, for somebody that's in that data set that opted in a third party app. You can track everywhere they've gone every store and get approximate home location. Companies know who these people are but we're not allowed to.

But people speculate that eventually Flock is going to convert based on their terms of service into that type of company.

OK, thank you so much. My next question is actually for Chief Kennedy. and I think this may have already been asked, but I'm gonna ask it again. So we have flock cameras, we have CCTV cameras. There's no way that those CCTV cameras are like any way it could be attached to Flock or you would never feed it through some other type of AI thing to extract data from it.

No, our CCTV cameras are through the Genetech portal. It's a completely separate portal than Flock.

And another question I had from a constituent had to do with the buses. And I know that's not Flock, but it's some other company and I don't remember the name of But are those cameras still license plate reader? Do they read license plates like flock cameras?

I don't have, I'm not as up to speed. Captain Ralph Willett has been running point on that. He's the commander of our traffic division but my understanding and Mr. Walker might be able to speak to it because I know he's sitting in some of the meetings when somebody would go by a school bus that had the stop sign out and the arm extended, that they would take a picture of that plate. It's Bus Patrol is the company. And I know towards the end of the school year last year they were sending out warnings to people. And it was sort of shocking the number of people that actually drive past school buses when they have the lights flashing and the arm out, So I think there's another meeting coming up this week to talk about the rollout of that. But I don't believe it's a flock camera, but it definitely reads the license. It's an ALPR camera.

It is an ALPR camera.

I believe so, yeah, because it gives a pretty clear picture of the vehicle.

So when the stop sign is closed, the camera is covered?

I'm sorry, sir. Could you say that again?

When the stop sign on the bus is closed, the camera is covered.

That's my understanding. But again, I'm not as well versed on that because they haven't been in those meetings. have really been with the school department, Mr. Walker and Captain Willard?

Because the only reason I ask that is school buses are... We talk about these flock cameras are only on our main streets but these school buses in our neighborhoods they're turning around in our driveways at least I live at the end of a dead-end street and they are definitely turning around in my driveway. Okay, very good. Also, when a police detective goes into the flops after the AWS cloud whatever it is, do they have to create like a... I know the cloud is creating a repository of the searches but is there any Did the detectives have to create a CAD inside the system? So you use QED, right? Inside the system. Yeah I mean does it trigger them having to do an input into the computer-aided dispatch?

If they're going to search for something, they're gonna need a case number. So they would have to enter some type of call into CAD in order to generate the case number to do the search.

So you also mentioned an audit or that I think it was Captain Miller.

Captain Miller does the audits, yes.

When did that audit start? I know you had mentioned it. How far back do those audits actually go?

Yeah, so the audit we did was back to January. This past January, yeah.

So out of 11 years, we have nine months of audits. Correct, yes.

So yeah, six years with Flock and then the other time with the other system I can't really speak to. I just remember they were always breaking.

And you know In the past, I worked in law enforcement. I was a law enforcement ranger for the National Park Service. I worked at Hingham 911 for a time One of the things that we used to get was, you know, people looking to ping somebody's cell phone like a missing person. And you had mentioned that you use Flock for their aid in this. this activity to help find missing people. Have you noticed, and I mean you probably don't actually have any numbers to back this up but maybe anecdotally do you notice that the call for pinging cell phones has decreased as Flock has been introduced. Do you find that the department doesn't ping as many phones because they can use Flock?

Yeah, I haven't. You know, I'd have to speak to my communications people and see. I know they still are pinging phones especially when somebody is endangered

Okay, and earlier you had said that monthly there's the audit. dating back to January, and you said that Captain Miller sends you an email regarding that audit. So he always emails you the results of his audit. It's never by phone, it's never through text message, it is always by email?

No, I mean we've spoken about it but I've been asking him to send me an email with the results of his audit and that's all obviously public record. And it's another thing we might even start putting on our transparency portal as well, the results of the audits.

Mr. Ross had mentioned something and I hope I'm not messing this up, but he had said that there's three things in regards to law enforcement that there is an interest in it. It's like officer manpower in technology and community cooperation? Or how, I guess that'd be like how the community perceives the police. Of those three things which one of those is the most important to you?

Well, Councilor the technology obviously you know we're in the trust business. You know I like to say we don't police our community, we police with our community and I think that in our department we've been making deposits into the bank of trust for a very long time in this community. And I stand before you today, and I'm asking to make a withdrawal. I'm askin' ya to trust me, and understand that... Thank you. I was at a training and a gentleman said, talking about trust. And he put a picture of a dorsal fin up and he said is that a shark or is that dolphin? and you know, people weighed in. And he said well I can tell ya, I grew up surfing in Southern California, I know that's a dolphin, 100% that's dolphin. and some of you will trust me. Some of you go surfing, and a lot of you are gonna be heading for your car because all you're going to see is Jaws. And I understand that people in this room... A lot of people are just gonna see the shark

and I get that, and I'm not trying to... I knew I wasn't gonna come in here tonight and change anyone's mind. I'm standing up here because I'm passionate about this technology. I've seen what it can do. I have been in the hospital rooms with survivors of sexual assaults at three o'clock in the morning and I'm passionate about it. So, I know that it can help us, it has helped us, It will continue to help us as long as we have it and that's why I'm standing up here. I know it's not the most popular thing to do, I've upset people in my own agency when I restricted who had access to it because we have a lot of really good young officers who are conscientious would like the alerts when a stolen car comes in. And we said, no, we're not giving it to you. We're going to restrict it. I know I'm upsetting some people in the community that are against it, but I've also had a lot of calls from people who were supportive of it. There's a lot to talk about John Adams tonight

and I'll tell you when he represented the soldiers in the Boston Massacre, he did what he thought was right even though it wasn't popular. So I understand I'm a man on an island up here I'm passionate about this technology because I've seen what it can do. So yeah, community you know they're the reason we get to do what we do and so yeah the Community Trust is important but so is being able to find you know, somebody who's endangered so is being able to take a serial rapist off the street. These are things that are important to me.

And my final question here is, you showed us a policy. Was that a draft policy or was that like an official?

The one I gave you? Yeah. That's going to replace the current policy that we have.

So the question I have is, how comfortable are you in enforcing that policy?

Very comfortable. enforcing the policy, violation of that policy are criminal offenses. So like I've said we hold people accountable in this department. We have parted ways with people. I've suspended people. the Chief for three years, and we've parted ways with a number of people. So obviously I'm going to enforce that policy.

All right. Very good. Thank you. I don't have any more questions. Councilor Yuan

Thank you, Chair. But this question is for my colleague. So I have a question for all my colleagues or the councillors what's the rationale of keep doing business with and keep spending tax dollar money, and keep subjecting our residents and private information to a company which has been repeatedly reported to breach trust. I want to ask my colleagues why we're still doing that.

Chair Neill. I think you know, I'm here tonight to really learn and listen. And I really want to process all of this over a little time and do some more research. I mean, I find myself more on the fence than I would have expected to be because I do think we're generally a very safe city. We've been able to manage without this, but I do If I think about my son getting kidnapped, then I think would I want faster access to information? So I think there's reasons to consider this.

I think, there's a lot of downsides as well. and I really appreciate the time that people have taken to come in and share their views. I've learned a lot, so I really hope that we can continue to discuss this but We might want to table that discussion, especially as it's getting late now for another meeting. And I also do have questions about the finances as well so we might want Hubley, Jacobs, Koch, Mahoney, Riley, Ryan, Walker, Yuan, Quincy, Councilor

Thank you, Chair. Because this is what we ran on doing We ran on being thorough, we ran on asking all the questions. We ran not rushing things through so we are having a series of meetings to go through the process. This is the legislative process, it's slow and sometimes bumpy and sometimes you get impatient with it. That's my answer but I have a few more things. So, Flock is a troubling company. And I think in my opinion and in part because of the way they've conducted themselves business-wise, but also in part we'll say the network architecture of the topology of their solution.

Their, the topology of their solution is their advantage and their challenge. So each camera powered by solar power which is pretty lightweight and easy to deploy you can put it almost anywhere doesn't require a Cat6 cable run back to a PoE switch, setting up of a network, maintaining that network through hardened equipment which is expensive. It has onboard storage because when it makes its probably HTTPS connection, sending its metadata and images up to the cloud. needs to buffer that in case the cell signal, the LTE or 4G signal doesn't have connectivity. That leaves it vulnerable to be hacked for its onboard storage and information It's published to the cloud, which is great because everyone can get to it. But it's also a challenge because everyone gets to it and so there are a number of challenges that they have

they're also trying to monetize things beyond the obvious monetization strategy. It's very similar to how video companies also make money. I mean, you pay your Netflix subscription. You pay your HBO subscription. and they give you content, and there's licensing for that. And they make money that way. There's a share the cable company or the delivery mechanism gets a share of that. The content provided gets a shared of that so forth. But then there's the usage information. When I was in the cable television business, there was this thing called Nielsen and Nielson made a great amount of money. And they also got into the phone business oddly enough where they were doing phone carrier statistic analysis through different cable operators and different phone operators. And so they're doing something business-wise

and in doing so they're losing trust, in my opinion by trying to monetize it. And I think someone else also made a good point earlier and their technology company and they're going at the speed that they can manage and that opened you up to issues. So I think their advantage is their challenge, it's opened them up to some challenges technology-wise there are other types of systems that are more closed, but they're more cumbersome to deploy. They're more expensive to deploy and they take longer to deploy. But the advantage is, you can own all the equipment, you could own all of the storage devices, you put it in your own facility so that you can secure it up there's different ways of doing this technology but you know Flock has an advantage in its network topology and it's architecture, but also its vulnerability. So I have a lot of concerns about Flock as a company

but I also have a lot of concerns for privacy. And this is why in the top of this meeting, one of the last question I did at the top to get a sense for where we thought the disposition of our state legislature would be for tackling this. And it's, I think really inevitably anything the municipalities do at some point in time will be superseded by state legislature and we'll just have to adapt to that but and I've spoken to two of the three delegation members that represent us. Hopefully, things can move along there but in the meantime this is our gig and this is our problem right now. So I'll just close with that, thank you.

Thank you, Chair. I just want to follow up with Councilor McKee and Councilor Hubley. So my question is mainly about Full Arc Company So, Councilor McKee mentioned this technology is still useful. That I agree. but my main concern is since this company has been caught repeatedly like breached trust, that's very concerning. Like if the trust already lost then you can have all kinds of questions. And we kind of like every day just watching them to see, oh if they did something abnormal or some right? So also to Councilor Hubley,

This is not just, oh, some mistake happened during the technology development. It's not. They lied. So that's a complete difference. So for this, if you are doing business with some company the trust already lost. I just don't understand why we want to keep doing like a... and so I think the first step is we should cut ties with this unreputable company. Then next, if administration discuss all these technologies still useful or if we legislature, guard rail also developed. We really still can consider about it. I didn't say completely know this technology but I just think a flock should go should go away.

And also, during this time we can wait for like more information come people know better about this technology and the protection are in place, legislature gathering there. Then you can think about like another ALPR company, and then we need a public discussion and the city council's approval. that's my point. So with two steps, first step we need to cut a tie with this company. It is already approved and trustful why you still subject residents private information to this company, how long do you have keep doing this? This is not about we don't want to do things carefully or something. I really considered about resident private information

Chief, I just had one more question. How much, I know we have X amount of different contracts with Flock because these cameras came on at different times. minus the, well I guess I'd like to know how much we've actually spent. I know some of it's through grants and you can just if you don't know the actual numbers maybe you have an estimate but how much are we into flock for like the actual hardware? and then how much are we spending annually to maintain the whole thing?

Yeah, on average it's about $3,000 per camera per year. and we have 49 ALPRs in one condor camera. So what's that, ballpark 150? And then 75% of that is paid through Homeland Security Urban Area Security Initiative grant So I'd say ballpark in here, I think out of our budget is around 50.

All right, thank you. And I think Councilor Hubley had another question?

Yes, thank you Chair through you to Councilor Yuan. I think you misrepresented what I said. I didn't say they made a mistake. I said they made bunch of business decisions which lost trust. and they're also a fast-paced growing company so they will also have growing pains and make mistakes. So not naive to their business strategy and how that has lost trust, so I'd appreciate if you wouldn't misrepresent what I'm saying. That's all.

Okay, great. What? Do you want to say something?

Go ahead.

I'm going to try and get this out. I think we have follow-up questions that are not going to be answered here tonight, you just asked about financing. I have financing questions. I can't go into that tonight. I'd like to know some of the questions... and I have follow up questions to the Chief, potentially even to some of the special guests that we've had tonight. But I think we have to get into discussion too is also like what's you know? What are the legal ramifications if we get out of it? Are they leased or do we own them? Are we in a lease situation?

We lease the situation?

Yes. Yes, we leased the cameras.

So if we were to cancel FLOC, we would still have to pay out the lease until their contract expires?

that's something I would say for the solicitor, but my understanding is yes.

That's what I'm saying. There are some outstanding questions that we have to get answered before we can actually go the next step which financial cost of it, the legal parameters around it and just follow up for some of those questions. I don't have any energy to do that tonight. I have one more meeting to go to tomorrow night.

All right so I just want to say one last thing here Quincy is a safe community and it is a multitude of different factors. The people that live here, the community members that work here and serve us here You know, I grew up here in Quincy and Howes Neck. My wife did not she grew up in a neighboring community. I won't name that community but when we moved to our house in Howes neck I'll never forget. We're painting the whole house up and down, walls ceiling all that stuff right so it smelled in the house. So of course I opened the windows and I left them open Now where she had lived in the previous town, she lived on the third floor. So we did sleep with the windows open. But when we were at our house in House Neck on the first floor, she said you got to close those windows and I was like what are you talking about? and she goes, well someone could break into the house.

Someone could climb in through the window. I'm like what are you talking about? Growing up here in Quincy living in Howe's Neck, I never gave that a thought but there are communities very near to us that people do live like that and it's not every community. Another reason I moved or chose to continue to live in Quincy, I should say is when you call 911 When I called 911 as a kid, I got Janice McGee and she was my neighbor of mine. And no matter what it was always somebody you knew. It was somebody you know that you could trust on the other end of the phone the person who came into your house from the police car, I'll never forget during COVID on my son's first birthday. My wife fainted when we were getting ready for work and she had COVID and the flu, and Jim McCarthy house neck firefighter carried her down the stairs. And that doesn't happen everywhere.

and it's happening in fewer and fewer places, but it's still like that here in Quincy. I'll never forget when my wife first voted in Quincie and she is a voter, she always voted. And she said to me, this was when I was living over on West Quincy After we voted, she goes, that was so weird. And I said what? She goes, I knew and have met every single person I just voted for. And she was like, I've been voting for years and I never talked to anybody I ever voted for And that's the kind of community we live in. Just like the chief said, it's a community and it's built on trust. In the police department, the firefighters are elected officials. They've all earned that trust because they go out and make the effort to do so. That's all I wanted to end this meeting, so I'm going to ask for a motion to adjourn this oversight committee meeting at 1030. Motion made by Walter Hubley. Looking for a second?

Debra Riley. Thank you, award six. And thank you. And we're going to just go back into the public hearing very quickly because that's still ongoing and I'm gonna close the public hearings seeing as there's no more speakers. Can have a motion to close the Public Hearing? and seconded by Walter Hubley. Thank you so much, have a great night.

Thank you.