Fort Wright discussed a potential contract with Flock Safety at their Feb. 18 caucus meeting. Council members Jason Collins and Bernie Wessels requested City Administrator Jill Cain Bailey pull information about the company and a potential agreement. Mayor Dave Hatter let his opposition be known at the start of the discussion.
“I’m a no,” Hatter said. “Nothing you can say will convince me. Unless you all have a supermajority, this is dead. I will veto this.”
Hatter is a cybersecurity professional at Intrust IT and has expressed concerns about privacy and cybersecurity issues before.
“If your [relative] were the victim of the crime, wouldn’t you want every tool possible used to help?” Collins, one of the council members in favor of a contract with Flock asked.
Collins also pointed out that the city already has security cameras in place and that people carry camera phones everywhere. Council member Margie Witt was concerned about trading personal privacy for promised safety.
“If there are so many cameras around us all the time, why do we need more?” Witt said. “I see too many examples of this type of technology being abused.”
Bailey’s compiled report included information on Flock’s business model, other localities that have partnered with them, links to articles (some suggested by Hatter), and a price quote from Flock. If they entered into a contract with Flock, Fort Wright would pay $79,700 for three years of their cameras and service.
Fort Wright Police Chief Jonathan Colwell spoke to the council about how the department might use Flock.
“What this does, from my understanding, is it creates a vehicle fingerprint,” Colwell said. “It is up to the police department to find out who it belongs to.”
Hatter explained to LINK that the connections the police department and Flock make between cars, owners, and data are stored in a database. While Fort Wright’s information from Flock states that they will overwrite all data after 30 days, Hatter expressed doubts about the efficacy of this practice.
“There is no such thing as deletion,” Hatter said. “Everything is recoverable.”
Council could not take any legislative action at a caucus meeting, so Bailey was mainly trying to gauge whether a majority was in favor. It would take four votes to initially approve a contract. Then, the mayor has 10 days to veto the proposal and give the council his reasoning. Within the next two council meetings after the veto, the council would need to vote with a supermajority (five votes out of the six members) to override the veto.
Flock contracts have been a point of contention for other Northern Kentucky cities, including Bellevue. That council required the mayor’s tie-breaking vote to pass the motion. Hatter made it clear that he would not do the same.
“You might want to go ahead and read ‘1984,’” Hatter said, referring to George Orwell’s novel focusing on government surveillance.
The council has tabled the larger discussion for a future council meeting.