This story was originally published on MyNorthwest.com
Whenever cameras go up, people start getting fired up, whether they are speed cameras, red light cameras, or any public surveillance system.
I received an email from Jerry in Stanwood last week. He was fired up for sure. He wrote, “The city council put up 14 cams around town to check speed, tabs, warrants etc. … people are irate!!!”
I was intrigued. So, I rolled up to Stanwood to take a peek alongside Stanwood Police Chief Jason Toner.
Stanwood installed 14 cameras. They are on the main roads into and out of the city, but they are not speed cameras or red light cameras or money makers. They are part of a Flock Safety System, which reads the license plate of every car that passes by them and gets pictures of the back bumper and other identifying features like make and model.
Sounds kind of ominous, but more than 70 cities in Washington use this system. And the Big Brother concern isn’t lost on Chief Toner.
“I mean, that’s a legitimate concern,” he said. “Is it too much big brother? Too much government watching all the time? That’s not what we want.”
Stanwood installed the cameras to make up for having a small department. There are only 10 officers, including the chief, on the force, including only one working the night shift. It’s a way to use technology to make the community safer.
“Most of the property crime that is committed in Stanwood is done by people that come from outside of our community,” Chief Toner said. “It was just a way to build a visible fence, so we know when somebody’s coming into our community that’s up to no good, we have a little bit of notification.”
“We are happy to have the new Flock Camera technology in Stanwood,” Stanwood Mayor Sid Roberts said in an email. “Our community is safer with it, and those who would come here with crime in mind might want to think twice.”
So how does the Stanwood license plate camera system work?
“It’s not video surveillance,” Toner said. “It’s basically a camera taking a bunch of still photos of vehicles on the road, and with machine learning, it categorizes those vehicles by license plate, make, model, amount of bumper stickers.”
There is no live video feed, and there is no tracking. For example, a stolen car gets picked up on the camera.
“Our officers working on the west side of town, and somebody comes in on the east side of town with a stolen vehicle, they’re alerted of that,” Toner said. “They can go to that area and hopefully either catch or deter any future crime.”
And it’s already working. Toner said the system helped nab a suspected thief.
“I was pretty amazed,” he said. “Within the first week, someone that had victimized our community several different times for $1000-plus worth of merchandise we were able to hold them accountable.”
In that case, the suspect’s car had a distinctive bumper sticker that the victim’s camera system caught during one of the thefts. The Flock System alerted when a similar car with the same bumper sticker came back to town. Officers checked it out, and the suspected thief was busted.
For Toner, the early success shows the system can be really helpful.
“There’s no facial recognition. It’s not any like speed cameras or red light cameras, nothing like that,” Toner said. “The data is deleted after 30 days, so we don’t keep a database of anybody’s movements throughout the city. It’s just for investigation purposes or letting us know when somebody that has already committed a crime and is in the system comes into town.”
It will also notify officers when a car involved in an Amber Alert or a Silver Alert enters the area.
Stanwood has the system on a two-year contract. If it doesn’t pan out after that, the city could drop it.
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