(Here is the longer version of my West Newsmagazine article posted on June 16, 2021.)
Police
departments, businesses and homeowner associations alike have been flocking to
Flock Safety at an exponential rate since the 2017 inception of that
Atlanta-based company.
Following a presentation from Territory
Sales Manager Lisa Dunn at its June 14 board meeting, Ballwin voted unanimously
to purchase two Flock Safety cameras.
One will be aimed westbound and the other eastbound along Manchester
Road.
“At Flock Safety, our mission is to eliminate
crime,” Dunn said. “We do that by
detecting the evidence that goes through these cameras, decoding that
information with the software that we have, and then delivering it into the
right hands.”
The official name of the equipment is
Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras. Flock Safety currently boasts service of
such items to 4,000 cities nationwide.
The police department, which is how
Ballwin serves to utilize the cameras, can then look through to see when
vehicles that fit a certain type and color passed by a specific area.
Dunn proceeded to show specifics of how
the software works in processing information so vehicles can be recognized more
easily than by any traditional or even other recent methods.
“The main difference of our camera systems
is that we can do wide-scale deployment, and that’s by utilizing solar panels
and LTE (Long Term Evolution as in 4G wireless) connectivity,” Dunn said. “But
we also utilize a vehicle fingerprint technology. This gives you more information on the
vehicle itself for the officers to be able to look through that evidence and
find the right vehicle in question.
“The technology that we use is called
Machine Learning Technology. Whenever a
vehicle passes through, a camera is motion activated so it takes a series of
pictures. We are able to then pick up
the entire vehicle so that when the criminals come into the area with no plates
or even with a stolen plate.”
Each image can be expanded to give more
information, including how many times a vehicle has passed through and where
it’s been over the past 30 days. Dunn gave a demonstration of how the system
can quickly go through some 2,700 objects to narrow down the details to five in
the case of recovering stolen vehicles.
Dunn gave an example of one stolen from Ellisville, and with the help of
a camera there, the vehicle was quickly found in Florissant thanks to that
municipality’s cameras.
The methodology has also helped stymie
kidnapping cases as in her example of one in Memphis that was solved in a
positive manner in just one hour’s time.
In response to Mayor Tim Pogue’s inquiry,
Dunn said that the information is readily available to a police department for
30 days before being stored on Amazon Web Services.
“It’s your guys’ information,” Dunn
said. “We do not share it. We do not sell it. We only share it if you want us to share
it. Again, with the multi-agencies,
they’re all sharing with each other, but they have to let us know if they want
to share.”
Per Alderman Kevin Roach’s (Ward 2) question,
the cost to the city would be $2,500 per camera per year with a one-time
installation fee of $250. Dunn said that
normally, the purchase numbers by municipalities depends on the city’s
population & number of officers. Current
area municipality camera numbers include 10 in Fenton-10, 17 in Wentzville and
18 in O’Fallon.
“The chief wanted to start with two and
see how it goes, and then we would go from there,” Roach said. “That was his recommendation.”
“Also, we’re working in cooperation with
other municipalities,” Alderman Jim Leahy Ward 3) said. “To be honest, we have one major thoroughfare
(Manchester), and that’s where we’re putting them. So, I agree with the place we’re starting.”
Concerned that it could drastically affect
the workload for Ballwin’s dispatchers and officers, fellow Ward 3 alderman
Frank Fleming mentioned a different sidelight to the camera issue.
“The case we talked about (at a previous
meeting) was that the license plate determines if there’s a warrant, and our
dispatcher has to kind of run the additional information,” Fleming said. “That’s primarily what we’re still talking
about, right?”
Police chief Doug Schaeffler confirmed it
could readily be used for warrants and also for other violations. But he
reiterated that, even though that will take a lot more time and effort from his
department, that’s part of their job.
As yet another selling point, Dunn added
that her company’s software is adding and releasing new features every quarter.
They work with countless law enforcement
agencies who tell them precisely what’s needed to do their job to the best of
their ability.
“One of the things they were saying is
that we need more identifiers on the vehicle, whether back rack, top rack,
bumper stickers, etc,” Dunn said. “So,
we just released that last quarter. We do take every advice from our law
enforcement agencies to best help them.”
Finally, Alderman Michael Finley (Ward 1)
had the floor just prior to the unanimous passing of the motion.
“One
of the reasons we went to this exercise was to allay any concerns about personal
liberties being hindered,” Finley said. “We’ve
done our due diligence, having this discussed at two meetings. There have been two sessions where citizens
could have come and voiced any concerns.
Nobody has. I haven’t received any adverse communication from constituents,
so I wanted to have that duly noted in the minutes that there has not been any
negative citizen feedback that I’m aware of.
If there is, I assume my colleagues would let us know. Otherwise, everything looks in order to
proceed.”
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