By Staff Reporter
CHEEKTOWAGA — Three Cheektowaga police employees who were suspended for using the town’s Flock license-plate cameras to follow a co-worker’s car for months will not face criminal charges, Erie County prosecutors have decided. That closes the criminal side of the case. It leaves open the questions residents have been pressing at Town Hall: what the discipline will be, how the searches went on for months before anyone caught them, and who is checking the system now.
The Public Integrity Unit of the Erie County District Attorney’s Office found no criminal conduct, WKBW’s I-Team first reported. “The allegations did not rise to the level of criminal conduct,” the DA’s office said. WIVB reported that the office confirmed the decision on Thursday, Oct. 15.
What the department says happened
The department announced the suspensions at the end of September. Police said an internal audit showed that three public safety dispatchers had used the Flock system to search for another employee’s license plate over a period of months, Spectrum News reported. WKBW reported that one of the three has since become a police officer. The Buffalo Chronicle is not naming the employees because none has been charged.
“The behavior stopped, and an intensive investigation followed to determine the scope of the policy violation and whether the public was targeted. Additionally, the District Attorney’s Office was consulted during the process,” the department said in a press release.
In a statement to WKBW, the department said it “is taking this matter seriously and recognizes the importance of public trust. We have taken steps to tighten policies and procedures to help prevent future incidents.”
Cheektowaga has almost 30 Flock cameras across town, according to WKBW. The cameras photograph every passing plate and store the reads so authorized users can search them. At a Town Board meeting in June, Police Chief Brian Coons proposed adding two more, citing gains in investigative efficiency, the station reported.
Residents want guardrails, or no cameras at all
At the Town Board’s Oct. 13 meeting, some residents told officials to scrap the system. Others said their objection was to the oversight, not the technology. “It is time for us to completely dismantle our Flock system,” one resident said, according to WKBW. “I am not against Flock cameras. I am against the abuses and the fact that we do not have sufficient guardrails,” another said.
Town Supervisor Brian Nowak declined to discuss the personnel case but said the town had already changed how it runs the system. “We have made some changes regarding who has access to that system in terms of town employees,” Mr. Nowak said at the meeting. “We have made some changes in the oversight of the system. There is still some more work to do.”
A week earlier, Mr. Nowak told WBEN he was “not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” He said that dropping the cameras is “a possibility,” but “more likely than not, we’ll retain the system with some changes to how it’s regulated.” He also warned that switching vendors would not end license-plate surveillance. Towns should ask “how transparent are these systems? How can we verify the monitoring?” he said.
The vendor’s own rules are changing
Flock Safety rewrote its safeguards in August after misuse cases around the country drew criticism. “Abuse of Flock technology, at any level, is unacceptable,” Chief Executive Garrett Langley wrote in an Aug. 13 company post.
By the end of this year, Flock says, every police customer must use its “Audit Assistance” tool, which flags unusual search activity for a supervisor. Accounts that meet its criteria for abnormal behavior will be automatically locked pending review. Every search will also need a case code, and emergency searches without one will be flagged. The company lowered its recommended data retention from 30 days to seven, but existing customers keep the retention periods they already set.
Those changes go to the heart of the Cheektowaga case. A required case number is meant to stop searches with no investigative purpose, and an automatic lockout is meant to cut off repeated searches of the same plate before they run for months.
No state law sets the rules
New York has no statewide law governing how police use plate readers or how long they keep the data. “Currently, there is no regulatory framework in New York State that outlines restrictions and unlawful use of ALPR systems on behalf of New York State entities and law enforcement,” reads the sponsor’s memo for A.10808, a bill by Assemblymember Pamela Hunter. The bill would limit when government agencies can use the data, require audit logs and public reporting, and set penalties for violations. It was referred to the Assembly’s Consumer Affairs and Protection Committee on April 1 and has not moved since.
The New York Civil Liberties Union helped write the measure and its Senate companion, S.9890. “Lawmakers must pass legislation to curtail ALPRs by significantly limiting when they can be used, dramatically reducing data retention periods, and prohibiting data sharing outside of New York without a judicial warrant,” the group wrote in a May commentary. It says the bill would require most data to be deleted within 48 hours.
Supporters of the cameras say they work. Flock credits its technology with helping solve crimes and find missing people. Mr. Nowak said the cameras help detectives “put the bad guys away.”
What residents still don’t know
Several basic facts are still not public. The town has not said how long the searches went on before the audit caught them, or how often anyone reviews search logs. It has not said what discipline the three employees face, how long it keeps plate data, which outside agencies can search Cheektowaga’s cameras, or whether it publishes a Flock “transparency portal” listing its policy and search activity, as the company says more than 1,500 agencies do. WKBW has filed a formal records request for the disciplinary findings.
The fixes on the table are not mysterious. The town could require case numbers and automated audits now rather than at Flock’s year-end deadline, publish its retention period and sharing list, and release a summary of audit results to the Town Board on a regular schedule. Albany could set a statewide floor so the rules don’t depend on which town a driver passes through.
The Buffalo Chronicle has asked the Cheektowaga Police Department and Supervisor Nowak about the disciplinary outcome, the audit timeline and the town’s retention and sharing settings, and has asked the District Attorney’s Office which statutes it considered. Any responses will be added to this story.
Featured photo: A Flock Safety license-plate reader camera on a utility pole (Hayward, Calif.). Photo by RailTypes via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication).
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