Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

This is the 05/07/2026 regular meeting of the Fire and Police Commission. Present are commissioners Virgos, Evans, Fung, Spence, Spencer, World Patterson, and myself, commissioner Horowitz. Commissioners Ramey and Schneider are excused. Also present are FPC Executive Director, Leon Todd and Deputy Director, Jay Pusick. Director, please proceed with the agenda.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We will begin with item number one, public comment. For those who would like to speak and are here in person, please come up and sit at the front table when your name is called. If you are appearing virtually and have registered in advance to speak, please use the raise my hand feature in the webinar tools and unmute yourself when called upon to speak. Each person will be given up to five minutes to speak.

And as usual, we begin with people who are here in person. We do have a new public comment form and I think there may be some confusion about the additional comments and line where you indicate support or oppose an agenda item. Those were meant for those who did not wish to speak but wanted to submit a written comment or note their objection or support in writing. But it appears that that may not have been clear. So we'll see if we can make the public comment form clear in the future and then I will call out everyone's name and if you do not actually want to speak, you can just so indicate.

But we will begin with Emilio Dottore from Milwaukee Turners. Good evening.

Evening. Evening members of the Milwaukee and fire Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission. I'm Emilio Dottore with the Milwaukee Turners. It's no surprise to you that Milwaukee is in the midst of a surveillance crisis. It was clear through the year long push against facial recognition technology that residents don't wanna be surveilled by law enforcement and military contractors through weird public private business relationships. And I'm not even gonna get into the personal abuses by individual officers. What we are hearing about flock is more of the same. Last night, the city of Appleton voted to end their usage of flock. Just this month, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay refused to renew their contracts and Verona also. Dane County will terminate its contract in May and the City Of Madison has ordinances protecting the residents from ALPRs being deployed.

There are no guardrails that can guarantee our safety nor meaningful arguments for such invasive large scale surveillance that feeds into an already expansive web of digital stalking. I'll briefly outline some of the major points. Mass surveillance. There is a web of over 92,000 flock cameras and counting across the nation, and this creates a dragnet surveillance of all people whether or not they are suspected of a crime or wanted for any particular reason. The cameras pick up everything in range of their view, not just license plates.

They use AI to hone in on the licenses, but everything is covered. This has been shown extensively and regardless of the data accessible through the agreement with MPD. FLAC information is shared with the federal government. FLAC CEO Garrett Langley says that groups that monitor FLAC locations and speak against the use of FLAC like DFLAC are quote terroristic organizations whose primary motivation is chaos. A troubling response from someone we are paying to entrust with such power to surveil us.

His backers like Marc Andreessen are big donors to the current president and to deregulation of tech and cryptocurrencies like this surveillance. They have clear financial and political interests in the expansion of this tech. Flock claims that it has never been hacked. This is completely false. Musician and engineer, Ben Jordan, used a commercial search engine to show how easily you can identify and access the administration interfaces of Flock cameras, identifying where they are and none of the data or information was encrypted.

No username nor password was required. They were publicly facing and accessible by anyone. You can click and see every single person, vehicle, place, and activity that the cameras captured over those thirty one days. You can watch the footage in real time or access historic footage, not just select police officers. Anyone could do this.

He watched a man rollerblading and then looked at his phone and the camera's AI automatically zoomed in on the phone. Watched a couple arguing in a market and then used easily accessible flock, public data, and facial recognition technology to identify who who they were, that they had traveled forty five minutes from home to church that day, that they had just had a child and had debt based on that new baby. One of them had just finished medical school and the other was suffering from chronic irritable bowel syndrome, all of this from FLoC cameras. Given how FLoC has created and is marketing their new product Nova to provide law enforcement a one stop shopping for an aggregated database for synthesis and sharing, given how FLAC financial backers are also supporters of our current federal abuses and practices, and given how FLAC's website says that federal agencies it partners with, and I quote, can establish one to one sharing relationships with other law enforcement agencies, it is incredibly dangerous and unwise for us to continue to use this invasive product that forms such a large surveillance web to be integrated with other federal surveillance already being used to threaten and criminalize immigrants and political dissenters.

In Carpenter versus United States from 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that accessing historical cell site data information tracking an individual's movements over an extended period constitutes a fourth amendment search requiring a warrant based on probable cause. The current power and applications of flock go far beyond this. In cities like Syracuse, New York, their local ALPR system was searched 4,400,000 times by police around the country without a warrant and shared with ICE despite the intentions of their common counsel and despite promises to the contrary. This is just one example. It is being weaponized against immigrants, people seeking abortion access, demonstrators, and can be used for other problematic things we haven't imagined yet.

Please follow the lead of our neighboring cities and cease the use of flock. Thank you.

Brian Verdine.

Good evening, sisters and brothers. How are you?

Good evening.

Good to see you all. Just wanted to come here briefly to say thank you. Thank you. And thank you. Thank you, commissioner Spencer, in particular, for bringing this matter more forward in regards to stopping some of these unnecessary police chases.

I was reminded of when we were campaigning for the passage of s o p five seven five, we had some private meetings with people who had been victimized by the police, and one of those victims was Larry Jody Jenkins. He was murdered by John Bartlett, and so the family came to me. We met with the former commissioner chair for Loan and one other commissioner. We brought many families to the to to these private meetings, But the auntie of Larry Jody Jenkins, she said, we don't know you guys. The community don't know you guys, and I want the community to know you guys.

I remember I said last time, come on down to the Clinton Road Center or Washington Park Center, have your meetings down there, and we'll bring you a big crowd. But so I'm I'm grateful commissioner Spencer. I'm like, wow. Someone knows one of our commissioners now, and I thought you did a fine job, but I'm also convinced that by the way, Larry Jody Jenkins was murdered by the same cop who beat the crap out of Frank Hugh Junior and ended up spending getting a twenty three year sentence for for for his involvement in But so I was thinking commissioner Spencer that you probably been getting a lot of pushback already. God knows the Milwaukee Alliance Against Race and Political Depression has gotten a lot of pushback from citizens.

Oh, Chase, get the criminals. You know, everyone thinks it's just criminals everywhere in Milwaukee. Get them. Get them. Get them. And, you know, my rather unscientific survey when I do follow-up on the different neighborhood chats in among is generally the white males in our city, get the criminals, get the criminals, get the criminals, you know, something like that. You know? So people tend to be for chases until it happens to their family, you know, and then all of a sudden, oh, no. Maybe we shouldn't do some of these unnecessary chases. So I wanna thank you again, miss Spencer.

And then I think the press is still not doing us justice in terms of, like, it's just not commissioner Spencer's proposal. This was voted unanimously, press. This was voted unanimously by the Fire Police Commission. So it's not just b Spencer's initiative. It's the entire com commission that is moving in unity, and I thought it was really good. And frankly, mister Burgos, I I was I was sure he was getting a lot of pushback too. Like, my god. Why are you guys signing with those you call us activists. Actually, we're upstanding citizens, homeowners. All of my kids go to public schools.

I'm I've lived in this city all my life, a former teacher and a professor. You know? So I'm not just an activist, and all of these folks aren't here. I'm just activists. We're concerned citizens that want a safer city, you know? So and sister Horowitz, I think you'd be great on TV too. If you get I really do. I was like, you'd be great, you know, to be able to put this forward to the community. This is not to stop police chases, but it is to try to, you know, modify it a little bit. Mister Spence, you're the one who said, can we compromise somewhere?

And I was puzzled when you said that, but this is actually a compromise, and I think it's a good compromise, you know. So so let's let's keep pushing forward on this matter. And lastly, I just wanna say that I'm in full support of the efforts to stop these cameras from spying on us when we're driving down the streets to so called flock kind of cameras. Let's do away with those two. And as a brother from Turner's said, you know, let's join our our neighbors around the Wisconsin and get rid of these cameras. And let's lastly sue to get rid of act 12. Okay?

One more time. And Mr. Verdine, will I do want to follow-up with you offline. I do just want to discuss the idea of getting the FPC out in the community. So I think that's a good idea. I'll be reaching out. Tiffany Stark.

Hello everyone. I am gonna report I don't have an actual written statement. I'm winging it, but I am I also just want to say thank you to all of you again. We're in a holding waiting period right now waiting on Chief Norman. Like I said, I hope he does the right thing with this.

We're not asking for these chases to stop. We're asking for safe more safe measures so people can get home to their families and not die for something that's stupid. So, if not, I already got my paper here ready with the five elder people on the health safety public health safety committee that we will be calling. So, it's not a surprise how I feel about a lot of things and because I've been so focused on my daughter's father, there's other things I wanted to talk about and even with the police chases, the mental health aspect. People do not understand and I'm fighting with people on Facebook all the time and I want to thank you Brie for your wonderful story or your response to let to debunk the BS about this and being able to give your comments and of course, people are going to come and I'm fighting with people on Facebook all the time But what people don't understand is the brain.

And I studied the brain because I'm a social worker. And the whole response when you're in a heightened situation is fight, flight, freeze. And these are young people. Their brains are not most of these people are young and their brains aren't fully developed. So I'm trying to constantly educate people on that.

And also the fact that you know I'm not very happy that there's no public forum for the city common council to have comments so we have to come here and I'm very disappointed when the decision was made to put this curfew on food trucks without any public input. I'm sorry but the issues that we're facing downtown have nothing to do with food trucks. People are angry. We have a mental health crisis going on and no one talks about mental health at all. It's like we're putting all these band aids, the food trucks. Oh, we're going to build a little fence. Do you want to lose money? Build a fence. No one is going to come downtown. Like no one asks the community for feedback and input.

But I know is it is it done purposely? We don't want to talk about mental health? Probably because there's no money and there's lack of providers. But until we figure that out, we're going to continue to have these problems. When someone got out of the concert, they went to their car and there was an accident and they pulled out a gun and then the other person pulled out a gun. What does that have to do with a food truck? You know, none of this has to do with that. We're missing the mark on mental health, and it makes me angry because also we want to look at the symptoms and not the cause. Like when I worked with veterans, back in the day, we wanted to treat the drugs and alcohol. We didn't want to deal with their PTSD and trauma.

We missed the mark. Now we do that because that's their self medicating or they're dealing with other issues. A lot of these people have trauma. Brains are developed differently when you have trauma. People don't have basic needs. They're struggling to get through. They're angry. The issue is anger and the inability to regulate your emotions. That's where all of these problems stem from is anger and inability to regulate your emotions. And the guns, yeah, it's an issue.

There's way too many guns but the gun comes second. The mental health or the situation comes first. The gun is secondary and we can keep locking people up but guess what? That's not working. We've tried that and people come out worse when they came in because they're still not getting mental health services. So, it just really makes me mad because I'm a mental health advocate. This is my career and I I just to see this on TV and how you're how they're missing the mark. It's a mental health crisis. It has nothing to do with food trucks. Figure it out.

Ask for community feedback. We can come up with solutions. We can come up with ideas but there's no format like you you know, I've been saying with the common city common council. We have to come here. They don't ask us. So, that's all I have to say and once again, thank you so much. I'm staying positive that we're going to get this recommendation passed. And if we're not, well, we'll raise hell and we'll be calling them. So thank you.

Alex Larson.

Good

evening, y'all. Good evening. Good evening. Just as a point of clarity, I wanna lift up the fact that the police department should cancel its contract with FLOC, but I just wanna clarify that contracts themselves are not under your purview. Correct? That's under the purview of the common counsel? Yes. Like the finance personnel committee. To a to a certain extent. And then the audit function and the I guess the s o the procedural function lies in this body?

So we do have an audit unit and a flock audit is one thing that we are working on as part of our 2026 audit plan and that will you know I don't know what the audit is going to show until it's done but it could contain recommendations for policy training things like that or it'll also assess the compliance rate with the current policy.

So secondly I want to lift up the letter that's from the four older people that's attached in the legislative file because I think this points to the fact that we have a governance gap where the contract lies at the common council, whereas the oversight function sort of lies with the FPC and something like a community control over policing surveillance ordinance would kind of merge the two so we can have wholesale discussions over whether we need these contracts and have the oversight function be all in one place. Executive director Todd, I just want to point to historical examples during your tenure of how we've looked at other departments and sort of gleaned best practices and data from them when we've talked about past SOP changes to, you know, banning choke holds or no knock warrants or SOP five seventy five or the this pursuit policy that's just recently come to pass. All these are sort of like, you know, looking from out looking at outside municipalities and see what they do different and trying to, you know, advocate for how can we mold our city and mold the discussion around public safety and make it safer for everyone.

The thing with CCOPS is is that we also have 26 municipalities that already have established. And I don't know if that's an LRB thing or if that's like a FPC researcher thing, but that would be ideal because at the end of the day, you know, tonight we're talking about the 31 ALPR cameras that exist through the city, but they are a cog in a much larger surveillance ecosystem that exists throughout the city. And I would make the argument that we don't know the full extent of what's out there and what the department has access to. And that's, again, goes to the need of why we need a public forum to discuss all these things. The contract, the oversight function, and the audit functions all in one place.

And there are 26 other places that have that sort of governance in place. And I just want to give a shout out to the four alders that wrote that letter that have called for, okay, how do we get a roadmap from where we are now to having these structures in place. So I just wanna lift up those two things because as I wrote to you previously and as, you know, I said, this there is a much larger ecosystem than what we're just discussing tonight in that communication file. So yeah, I would just like to reiterate, I'd like to lift up the fact that this flat contract should be canceled and I'd like to lift up the fact that we need a governance model that allows us to have discussions to cancel these contracts in the first place. Thank you for your

time. Thank you. Thank you.

Ariel Winter.

Good evening.

Good evening. Hi. My name is Ariel Winter. I'm an organizer for the ACLU of Wisconsin and also a resident of the fourth Aldermanic of Milwaukee. Unfortunately, through my job, I have become all too familiar with flock cameras and other surveillance technologies and that's what implored me to speak on behalf of my community today.

Lots of jurisdictions across the country, including several in Wisconsin, have recently terminated their contracts with flock, and here are the reasons why. On April 15, Sturgeon Bay Common Council did not renew its flock contract. At the April, Oshkosh Common Council initially approved renewing a flock contract, but less than twenty four hours later reversed course and voted unanimously to rescind the agreement once they learned FLAC the FLAC representative made false statements about the capabilities of their products, specifically FLAC's ability to create heat maps and track daily driving patterns. Also last month, the Dane County board by a vote of 32 to one cut funding for flock after concerns brought up during public comment. President shared their concerns about sharing sensitive information with ICE.

They specifically know that while Dane County has said that it does not share flock data with ICE, the county has a history of sharing data with other jurisdictions that do. In the city of Verona, they voted to terminate their their flock contract at the 2025. Verona residents argued that the claimed public safety benefits were not worth the privacy risks. Within Verona system, hundreds of searches were still being tagged as federal even after the company claimed to have limited that access similar to Dane County's claims. Additional searches were linked to agencies identifying as ICE raising further questions about oversight and enforcement.

The same thing just happened in Dayton, Ohio too earlier this week. I also want to note that when the city of Verona contacted Flock to take down the cameras, Flock ignored their request while still actively sending out sales reps to Verona to get them to sign a new contract. Just yesterday, the mayor mayor of Appleton issued a statement that the city is stopping its use of Flock safety products due to concerns about the integrity of Flock's underlying system. An example from Georgia, flock's home states, residents of Dunwoody spoke out against the city's contract with flock after discovering that flock had been accessing the cameras in a pool and a gymnasium at a local Jewish community center. Story goes like this.

FLAC technology enables private companies to integrate their cameras with local police agencies similar to our dear district cameras. The Marcus community the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta shared its cameras with the Dunwoody Police Department. In January, city officials were alerted that the Dunwoody Police Department had granted access to the community center's cameras to external police agencies despite the network being marked in Dunwoody's system as do not share in all caps. Then through open records request, a Dunwoody resident uncovered records of flock employees accessing the camera feeds from gymnastic brooms, pools, and fitness centers at the Jewish community center. When city officials confronted FLAC, they learned FLAC employees have been using Dunwoody's FLAC network for potential sales calls with other law enforcement agencies, but city officials said not to worry because FLAC said they would no longer use Dunwoody's cameras for demonstration projects.

I have detailed instances of FLAC making full statements, an instance of city officials unable to contact FLAC after acquiring the products, an instance of FLAC employees using cameras for potentially purposes. We need framework in the common council and FPC to discuss like we are tonight any surveillance technology the city has or wants to acquire. To really underscore how important it is for the city to provide this comprehensive oversight now, On June 4, FLAC published a blog titled FLAC Safety Q2 twenty twenty five Law Enforcement Product Summary in which there was a section titled License Plate Reader Cameras Can Now Become Video Cameras. I'm quoting, in a move that will transform the largest network of license plate readers cameras license plate reader cameras in the nation, FLAC announced that every existing FLAC license plate reader camera can soon become video enabled at no cost to the customer. Again, Flock customers don't have to do or pay a thing, said Flock's safety chief security officer.

This will be a no cost software update. We just push over the cloud. Commissioners, we need a comprehensive framework to discuss community oversight over police surveillance. Thank you.

Thank you.

Amanda Merkway.

Good evening. My name is Amanda Merkway. I'm the Advocacy Director of the ACLU of Wisconsin. As others have pointed out, any conversation about FLAC automated license plate readers has to include a discussion about procurement processes and the use of sole source contracts, the oversight roles held by the Common Council's Public Safety and Health Committee and Finance and Personnel Committee and the FPC, the realities of how ALPRs and other surveillance tech are integrated together through products like FUSIS, the incorporation of artificial intelligence into these integrated platforms and the absence of SOPs in place governing many aspects of Milwaukee's surveillance infrastructure. Take facial recognition.

It was used for years in secret, many times without disclosing FRT use and discovery, all without an SOP in place. There was no transparency in any procurement process because MPD had other jurisdictions running the searches. MPD's contract with Tactical Support Equipment Inc. For cell site simulator, also known as Stingray equipment, was extended until September 2028 and increased by $165,000 to a total of $1,450,000 That's a sole source contract that waived Finance and Personnel Committee approval. The software is proprietary.

To my knowledge, there is no SOP governing the use of cell site simulators. MPD has a contract for FUSIS, a company that was acquired by Axon, which is a real time crime center platform that integrates private surveillance cameras, drones, automatic license plate readers and other feeds into a single police accessible interface. Sole source contract. To my knowledge, no SOP specifically governs the use of FUSIS and its AI powered search functions. MPD acquired an open source intelligence tool ahead of the RNC entering a contract for AI powered software from a company called Babble Street.

Reporting from 2024 from the Wisconsin Examiner notes, Babble Street draws on a wealth of online information to gather intelligence for police. An aspect of the software known as synthesis allows MPD to understand the profile of key influencers based on attributes such as person or organization, location, occupation, interests, areas of influence and communication style, which are all automatically tagged for millions of accounts using an AI model while still giving the city an option of manual tagging. Babbel Street also allows MPD to pair keyword searches with geofencing, thus alerting the department to post within a specific geographic area. NPD's new open source intelligence tool also enables data to be extracted from the dark web parts of the Internet, which are not intended which are not indexed in search engines and require specialized Internet browsers to locate. I found no SOP governing the use of AI intelligence tool without a warrant.

Finally, flat cameras. As of September 2025, there's 31 MPD flat cameras. I was able to get a list of the locations through an open records request, but no clue how these specific locations were selected and how many other cameras MPD and the Fusion Center have access to with ALPR capabilities outside of those 31 flock cameras. MPD's sole source contract with Flock Group Inc. Was increased from $100,400 to $182,900 back in February for the contract that runs through 01/26/2027, a contract term extension that was already granted without Finance and Personnel Committee approval in 2025.

It's our understanding that the requirement for single or sole source service contracts to be approved by Finance and Personnel Committee under the city charter was not applied to this contract amendment on the grounds that the contract involves services related to proprietary products. As I've raised previously, we desperately need a framework for the transparency of existing surveillance technology because the common counsel and the FTC may not be privy to the answers to some very basic questions about these technologies used to surveil Milwaukee residents. How does each surveillance technology work? Well, first, which ones do we have? How do they work?

What is the intended purposes of each technology? What's the fiscal impact of each technology? What and whose information is being collected and how is data stored, if the technology is not uniformly deployed or targeted throughout the city, what factors will be used to determine where the technology is targeted, what potential adverse impacts does the surveillance technology have on civil rights and liberties, and what standards must be met by government entities when sharing surveillance data with third parties, whether that's a private third party or another government entity. As the March 11 letter from Alders to the FTC noted, a framework adopted by many jurisdictions across the country called Community Control or Police Surveillance or CCOPS could provide the FPC and common counsel and the public answers to these basic questions and ensure transparency and basic democratic accountability. Milwaukeeans should not be surveilled in secret.

It's not good governance. Thank you. Thank you.

Minister Khalif Muib Al.

Good evening.

Peace everybody. How y'all doing? First and foremost, I wanted to speak to the placement bias with the flock cameras. These cameras was found by Christopher Newport University to be placed disproportionately in so called black and brown communities specifically. So the surveillance is largely gonna be in those particular areas that they label crime areas.

The problem I have with that is that it's another target on our people. My name is minister Kalief from Wabail from the Morris Science Temple of America and also the president of all of us in Wisconsin. And the second thing is the intensity of the surveillance. There's a very intense all day. It surveils.

There's also been misconduct on the police side with these flock cameras. I'm not gonna mention specifically what officer, but one officer had used the flock cameras a 179 times to stop their own x or what have you. That officer later resigned and was prosecuted or in the process of being prosecuted. So we see that this defective technology has no real significance in our communities, especially if there's going to be targeted in specific populations and demographics of people. That's never something that I believe that your aim should be, right?

So, I believe that if there is going to be any kind of justice around this issue, banning the usage of it is all together is probably the best way to go. I'm completely opposed to it. My community is completely opposed to it and also, it's assisting other law enforcement agencies and being able to do their jobs when they don't need that assistance if that makes sense. The FBI, ICE, all of those people are using these other gateways to gain access to other people and this is what's happening with this crisis with the ISIS situation with the immigration crisis. They're studying targeting people.

And mainly, everybody that came up here, they spoke, they spoke very eloquently and appreciate everybody that spoke before me. So, I don't want to be redundant but what I do want to say is is that you guys are all people. You're all our human beings and we know that our Fourth Amendment rights are already being infringed upon in this administration by every which way we possibly can think of. So, if there is another additive to that, that's only gonna create more frustration. Somebody got up here and spoke about mental illness.

People that live in high impoverished areas that we live in, the so called black and brown people, they come from hoard circumstances. Of course, they're going to be paranoid a lot. So, that will probably lead to law enforcement chases and things of that nature because I know when I grew up in in in 12 years old, I know I was beaten by police at 12 years old. So, naturally, every time I saw police, I took off. So I'm pretty sure that if there are officers in schools and all of these other areas where they're having these these negative interactions with officers and things of that nature, that anxiety is gonna be always up there.

To assist them in that particular regard with putting more flock cameras there and putting more stress on those populations is also exacerbating the circumstances in the community that creates more violent opportunities for things to happen in other people that are innocent bystanders are harmed by that. So with that being said, I appreciate your time, but I really want to make sure that we put an end to all of this excessive surveillance. I don't know what the purpose of it is. We do need to vet those things to the community because if the law enforcement's job is to protect and serve our people in the community, then there shouldn't be there should be some type of a community input on things. We had something that was back in the days called it's not community control over the police but we did have community insight where we had listening sessions with law enforcement on some of the endeavors that they were going to be implemented in the city that will probably and potentially affect the residents in that community.

And I'm thinking that something like that needs to happen here in Milwaukee if that makes sense. So I appreciate your time and patience. God bless.

Nicholas X. Dougherty. Good evening.

Greetings, commissioners. My name is Nicholas x Doherty. I am the conferred mass incarceration coordinator at the Milwaukee Turners. I wanna start by saying that living under the invisible chains of white supremacy is a painful and demoralizing experience. When it comes to structural violence, Milwaukee has broken records. Milwaukee being a city where the majority nonwhite population is suffering and and in pain. Milwaukee has consistently been ranked as one of the worst cities in the country for black people. The black community in Milwaukee is socially isolated and hyper segregated. I say that to say that people on the outside looking in don't understand what it's like to live under these conditions. Therefore, they lack empathy.

So we are looking at crime through the wrong lens. Crime is an indicator of oppression. What causes crime is unmet human need. When people have unmet needs, it is a human biology to survive, and punishment certainly will not curb survival. This room will be packed beyond capacity way more than what it is now.

If people from margin if I mean, with people from marginalized communities, still, most of our people don't have time to come because of structural violence has them worried about where their next meal will come from, how they will pay their rent, or where they will sleep tonight. In other words, when you have to survive, it becomes really hard to focus on freedom, justice, and equality. But when you're dealing with a white supremacist mind, survival gets framed as criminality. Poverty gets framed irresponsibility, and large areas get stigmatized, which gives the pretext for mass surveillance. So today, I am here to oppose flock technology, which is an aspect of that oppressive mass surveillance apparatus.

Flock technology is a form of social control and does not address the needs of Milwaukee. Instead, it communicates to Milwaukee residents that aspects of government and law enforcement view large portions of the population as enemy combatants. This kind of surveillance technology is the same kind they use on battle fields as counterinsurgency tactics. And now the police act as a domestic military implementing battlefield tactics tactics on poor and nonwhite communities all over America. There has been I mean, there have been over 53 cities, including Appleton, that have either discontinued this technology or rejected it altogether.

I think it would be in the best interest of Milwaukee to discontinue using Frott or any other automatic automated license plate reader technology. So I am asking you, the commission, to oppose this technology. Thank you for listening.

You.

Kevin Salz Perez. Good evening.

Hey, good evening.

I think tonight I'll start with use of force. So I think we need to broaden our view of what force is. Is from the conversations I've heard, it's about like the weapon being drawn and used and things like that. Absolutely. I think all of that is use of force and violence but also just in my observations of the world, like what escalates things is like when people, how people talk and what people say.

And so like even the words that people are saying I think can be forceful, uses of force and violence. And I know that it's hard to think about all that and document all this and everything, but I think that absolutely needs to be considered of how are people interacting with each other. When police come into a situation and it's tense and there's a lot of stuff going on, it's like how something is said, what something is said, names that people are called, all those things can escalate situations and create violent situations and escalate things. And so I think when we think about what is force, what is violence, who is using that, it's like I think we need to include that in that conversation and think more about how what people say will, can affect and escalate situations and how that should be maybe considered violent and use of force. So yeah, that's just, hopefully we can talk about that as that comes up in the agenda.

Then I'll move on to FLAC. I don't think we need an audit of FLAC. I think we know through all the things that people have been saying, through all the other municipalities that have said we're not going to renew our contract with FLAC, we see the things that are going on there. We know what we'll find in an audit that it's not good. We don't want the surveillance.

We don't need all those extra things that flock is all the extra surveillance that is happening with flock and other ALPRs. We know that it's not always accurate. We know that it's used in secret. We know that the harm that comes from it. And then beyond that, it's just the will of the people of like people are coming and saying we don't want this and so it's like we don't need an audit to show us that this isn't wanted here, that there is harm that comes from the use of flock and other ALPRs.

So yeah, the mistrust that is already between the community and the police is just exacerbated when you have already over surveilled communities having like, where is this coming from? What and it's it's being done in secret. We don't know what's happening. It's it just adds to the mistrust and and obviously, it's the will of the people to not have any more of the surveillance and so let's cancel this contract with FLOC and all ALPRs. Thank you.

Carlos Dixon.

All power to the people that people leave that. You say it back. All power to the Come on now. The people

in The Congo

need to hear

y'all. Alright. I can dig it. I wanna start by saying shout out to Vader Philanthropies. Okay? They write up the street on 3rd Street. They are a great organization. They hand out a bankroll to a lot of our institutions in the street. At the same time, they publicly support the state of Israel. But I digress. How are you you how are you guys doing today? Y'all alright? My guy right here is all good. Mister Leon Todd, man, you you look a little tense up there, brother. You gotta relax. Okay? Alright.

I'm nervous by nature. What can I say?

Me too. Oh my gosh. Alright. Look. This is my third time coming to these meetings. Right? And what's bothering me tonight is not just the police pursuits. It's not just the use of force. It's not just the surveillance. It's the realization that many of these folks in here have been coming here for years.

It's crazy. Asking the same people or the same institutions for the same little piece of humanity. While the conditions outside keep getting worse, at some point, we have to ask ourselves, are we changing the system, or are we becoming emotionally adjusted to the oppression? Because every month, we come in here talking about policy. We talk about oversight.

We talk about recommendations. Meanwhile, poor people are still being chased through neighborhoods, still being brutalized, still being monitored, and still being extracted from. And the city keeps finding money for everything except protecting human life. You wanna know what I notice driving down here except all the potholes. Random traffic cones, random construction setups, random cosmetic projects all over the city.

And every single cone, every truck, every contract, every consultant gets paid. But when the people ask for safety, when the people ask for housing, when the people here ask for mental health resources, when the people ask not to be haunted through their own neighborhoods by high speed pursuits, suddenly, the city is underfunded, and and we have to come into these type of environments. And I saw someone recently say they're in this room too. I don't wanna call them out. But if you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

Let me make something very clear. Okay? I'm not here fighting to sit at anybody's table. I'm here for the people who were never invited into this building in the first place. The poor, the exploited, the people the people surviving violence while professionals hold meetings about that violence.

I I call it making rules about us without us. Alright? And I need this entire room to understand something. People are losing faith in these institutions, not because they are irrational or not because they're extreme extremists, but because they can feel the contradiction. Okay?

You cannot surveil a population into trust. Trust. You cannot police people into dignity, and you cannot keep asking suffering communities to be patient while budgets continue to prioritize systems of control over systems of care. At some point, this city and everybody in this room, we must decide. Do you exist to protect human beings, or do you exist to manage the consequences of exploitation? Because those two are not the same thing. Thank you.

Hebet Mohammed.

Good evening.

Hello.

Okay. Hello. Good evening. I'm speaking in opposition to the continued usage of FLoC technology and the usage of any automated license plate readers. When the public began speaking out against expanded police surveillance, including FLoC last year, Milwaukee had the opportunity to be a leader in this arena by ending its contracts and removing FLOC's hardware.

Now with city after city ending contracts or rejecting FLOC due to community outcry and common sense, including many cities in Wisconsin, Milwaukee is falling behind. I'm not surprised exactly because MPD has repeatedly demonstrated or outright told us that they don't care about public opinion. So having stated my opposition to FLAC and all ALPRs, I'd like to raise items I and I'm sure the community are still awaiting updates on or feedback on. First, what's the deal with facial recognition technology? A voluntary moratorium implemented by a deceitful department is not where the buck should stop.

I want to see a full ban on FRT usage in Milwaukee. Wherever others stand on this, we still need a policy governing its use in Milwaukee and by MPD. Second, we've not heard a formal reply from the FPC to Chief Norman's propaganda trip to the genocidal Zionist entity this past December. The community spoke clearly to demand accountability, and we've not heard a formal response or position from the commission. I would like one.

Relatedly, at the last meeting, you all discussed limiting public comment and said you'd welcome presentations from community groups. How does a community group go about getting on the agenda and what's the criteria there? Even though I wasn't able to attend the last meeting where you debated this restricting of public comment And even though the time limit remains unchanged, which I support, I do still have some thoughts. We know that many of you resent public comments, especially when they make meetings go long. We know because you've said it to our faces and at times into the mics when you think we can't hear you.

Take today, for example. Before the doors opened, we heard someone, the chair, I believe, lamenting that it's all the same people here tonight, even if it's alright. Maybe it wasn't you, but we did hear it on the virtual. So somebody lamented that. So you lamented that it's all the same people here tonight, even if it's alright to give public comment.

I just want to be clear that we wouldn't need to return every meeting if we felt heard by all of you and if MPD wasn't allowed to operate with near impunity. As has been said before, if anyone here on the commission is not happy in this role because of long meetings due to us, the people, exercising our rights in one of the few remaining forums accessible to us, then quit the commission. You're paid to be here and we are not. And instead of seeing that as valuable to healthy communities, many of you have expressed it as a burden. I implore you to understand the power dynamics here.

You are stewards of one of Milwaukee's last gasps of democracy. I am painfully aware of the power dynamics myself, particularly as a Palestinian fighting to prevent the godzification of Milwaukee, and doing so by appealing to a commission chaired by somebody who's a member of a local Zionist organization, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, that supports the genocide of my people. And that tidbit is part of your public FPC bio, Chairwoman. So every time we hear anybody grumbling about us, every time you contemplate limiting our voices, you are aiding in the death of democracy. And we are here because we believe in our rights.

We want to be here. We want to see a better community. And I implore all of you to change the attitudes around that because it is not an easy thing to be here even if you see us every single time. And I would like for you to stop treating it that way. As one of my neighbors said, we are residents, we are homeowners, we have kids who go to school here, it is our right to be here. And if you don't like it, then quit. Thank you.

Stephanie, there's no last name listed. Good evening.

Good evening.

Again, hi. Okay. So if I could repeat everything that Emilio and Amanda and others have said, I would. Everything we need to know about the efficacy and quote unquote safety of flock cameras is there. And we keep having to say the same things.

If you're tired of hearing them over and over again, we're equally as exhausted by having to raise the same critical and salient points over and over again with no significant shift coming out of this body or the MPD or from the MD. Though there is still the endless push to push it forward and the strive to push it forward. This tech and access to it is continuing to evolve and widen at a pace far in advance of us having the proper safeguards in place to prevent its violent and potentially deadly misuse. If we consider this current period as the beta testing of what the use of flock can be, we are getting the results of that testing. Any potential benefits of this tech do not outweigh currently the harms, period.

The stalking of private citizens by those who purport to protect them, the unprotected sharing of the data, usage without a warrant, hacking and as we know, these cameras can be easily software updated to use FRT which is already a battle we have been fighting and have put a moratorium on in Milwaukee. All while FLAC itself as a company is making a push in courts to not have to disclose where these cameras are being placed. The community is crying out for help, as you are hearing, not for flap cameras. No one is asking for that or very few people are asking for that. Why is this not being heard?

People want to be protected by the from the violences that are being committed by those who are in positions of power. We do not want these cameras here and they do not make us feel safe. And then additionally, just wanna add because I thought of this. Was it this week? It was like a few weeks ago. I parked in front of the federal courthouse or something, and I didn't know I was in the zone where law enforcement cars are supposed to park. And as I was getting out, a cop came out of the vehicle in front of me and I was fixing things in my car and he said, you can't actually park here. These are just for law enforcement vehicles. You'll get ticketed and towed, like, right away. And I was like, oh, okay. Thank you. And I got out. And when I got out, I realized that both of the cars that

were parked in front of

me that are these law enforcement cars had their license plates scratched out, which we know is a move by cars to not be read by lice automatic license plate readers. So if our cops themselves are doing it, what is that? What isn't this supposed to keep us safe? Isn't this tech that they want us to have? So if the cops who are the people on the inside who want this in place don't actually want it being used on their vehicles or tailing where they go, what does that tell us? And I want that to be responded to. Thank you.

Brianna?

Good evening.

As was previously mentioned, I've been here and so many other community members have been here so many times speaking out about flock and other surveillance technology that is being forced on Milwaukee citizens. And what it boils down to this is this, Why do we need a citywide mass surveillance system that tracks where ordinary people go, who they associate with, and what personal decisions they make? That should concern every single citizen in

that's

point. I point. That's practices. Their reporting shows that federal agencies and immigration investigators were able to gain access to flock camera data through local police partnerships, creating what many experts describe as a backdoor national surveillance system. 404 also revealed that FLOC considered using using hacked and breached personal data in its investigative products before public backlash forced the company to back away.

That should alarm everyone. A company willing to even consider integrating stolen data into policing tools should not be trusted with sensitive information about Milwaukee residents. There are also growing concerns about cybersecurity misuse. Reports have documented stolen police logins, unauthorized access risks, and officers using surveillance tools improperly, as I'm sure you're well aware. And across the country, citizens like Appleton, Oshkosh, Verona, Sturgeon Bay are beginning to reconsider or remove these cameras because communities no longer trust these systems.

The MPD are trying to sell us on why we need a mass surveillance system that's being sold as a public safety tool, and I don't buy it. As technology is advancing, our civil liberties rapidly disappearing. Where will it end? As others have noted, we need a comprehensive framework for oversight and real community control of police surveillance. Get flock out of Milwaukee. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

For the commissioner's information, there's also been two additional comment forms submitted by community members that indicate opposition to flock cameras but they indicated they did not wish to speak. Bridget, do we have anyone online virtually for public comment?

Yes, we have Julie online.

All right. Julie, if you'd like to unmute your mic and then you can give your comment.

Thank you, Bridget, Directors, Commissioners, beloved community. Chaplain Julie Kirsiou, Milwaukee County resident. First, I am for a ban on the use of flat cameras and any FRT by the MPD for the reasons folks have shared tonight and at all the past meetings. Secondly, I am for any additional restrictions that can be implemented to reduce the plague of reckless police car chases in Milwaukee. And third, I am well aware that during these dystopian times, international law remains an illusion.

However, international bodies still exist, like Amnesty International, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, I could go on, so many others. But what do all of these international organizations have in common? They have all recognized that the genocidal, apartheid Zionist regime that is currently occupying Palestine is a chronic violator of human rights. That's right. The genocidal racist Zionist entity known as Israel is internationally recognized as a chronic violator of human rights.

You may ask, what does this have to do with Milwaukee? Exactly. Exactly. Chief Norman, Chief of Staff Huff, anybody on the commission who supports those two. Why in the world would the chief of the Milwaukee Police Department train with the racist, genocidal regime of Israel, an internationally recognized violator of human rights?

Reports from Amnesty International a decade ago documented widespread constitutional violations, discriminating enforcement tactics, and a culture of retaliation by the Baltimore Police Department, a police department that received training on crowd control, use of force, and surveillance from the genocidal entity called Israel. Just like chief Norman, why was of the the that's techniques, working with the mentally ill, the mentally challenged, training on constitutional rights of people using nonviolent protests to express their opinions, things like that. I grant you, you'd be hard pressed to find an ethical police department. Department. That would be an oxymoron, I guess.

My god, though, of all the places Israel. You would think people would have the basic decency to not train with such an evil entity, but here we are, and we keep bringing this up. What can be done by this commission to ensure that such egregious training never happens again? When will the public be informed of what the chief was doing over there? What other training options or entities are available?

Do you all investigate any training organizations for efficacy or ethics? Who is involved in the decision making about where training is received? Or is it just a matter of accepting from any entity that wants to buy you off, pay for your trip, take you sightseeing, put you up at the Ritz Carlton. I mean, I get wanting to train outside of this corrupt and dying nation. But Israel, Judas Priest.

How about checking out police training in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand? Have you checked out any places that are highly ranked by their citizenry, highly ranked for their global reputations? Ations. Please, we keep begging you to be transparent about what happened on that trip and what can be done to ensure it never happens again in order to protect and prioritize the safety of the people of Milwaukee. Will it be put on the agenda ever so that it will be formally addressed, or are you gonna keep ignoring our concerns? Free Milwaukee from dangerous policing. Free Palestine. It's all connected. I thank you for your time.

I do just want to briefly comment that public comment is an opportunity for members of the public to make their opinions known and their positions known to the commissioners. It's not necessarily for back and forth comment or question and answers. That said, there's a number of items that have been raised here that are not on the agenda that people have indicated they would like more information on. Even if they are not on the agenda, people are free to reach out to the FPC department and ask to speak with myself and I'm happy to do my best to answer questions. So I did just want to say that. Bridget, is there anyone else virtually for public comment?

There are not.

All right.

There

being no further comments this concludes the public comment portion of the meeting. Director, please proceed with the agenda and I I request that item number 10 be moved up.

I I I'm sorry.

That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, right.

We're gonna move. Leave who it is. Yeah.

Oh, he's requesting that it be left where

it was. Leave it alone? Yeah.

Okay. Why? Why?

Because there are other things to

talk about.

I I don't agree

with that.

Commissioner. Yeah.

I would like in recognition that that's the major interest here tonight, I would like

to move that out. Okay.

Item 10, FPC212509, communication from the Milwaukee Police Department relating to automated license plate readers or ALPER. This is again item 10 that we're taking out of order. It's item 10 under new business. And we have with us today from Milwaukee Police Department Chief of Staff Heather Huff and Risk Manager James Lewis and I believe they have a PowerPoint that I will help them queue up.

I will say preliminarily that we cannot have outcries from the audience. If you have more to say in response to new information, please put it in writing and submit it to us but do not disturb the conduct of this meeting.

Oh, it's not in here.

You don't have it.

I don't think this is in the file. It's not in the file yet. Right?

It's not in the file now.

It was this submitted for their file?

No. I gave it to Lee.

Oh, okay. I am not a client yet. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

We have this added to the file after the fact? Yes. Thank you.

Okay. Alright.

Okay. Go ahead.

So good evening commissioners and thank you for this opportunity to discuss all of the different auditing functions we have put in place for our flock system. I do want to start out and acknowledge all of the public comments. The Milwaukee Police Department appreciates the public comments that are made and despite disagreeing on many issues, we take all of these comments to heart and we take them seriously. So thank you to all of those who came out and thank you to all those who are staying for this presentation. It is really important for the department to find a balance between the interests of what we believe is public safety and the privacy rights and surveillance concerns of those in our public like those who have come to speak out today and those who have come to speak out in the past.

We do not discount those opinions and therefore our presentation today focuses on many of the different auditing functions we have put into place in the past few months that we're happy to share with this body and with the public. But before I begin and let me make it clear, the department believes that license plate readers are a valuable tool for public safety. And I want to talk about two recent incidents where they were vital in solving those crimes for this community. The first is street takeovers. We all know that a few weeks ago, in all of the news, there was an outcry that people's quality of life was disrupted and people were fearful that street takeovers were taking place all across the city of Milwaukee and other jurisdictions surrounding Milwaukee.

And they all told us the same thing, do something about it. And so our immediate response was limited by the capacity of having officers able to address those issues and officers able to figure out where the street takeovers were taking place as a reaction. But key to the investigation that led us to the organizer of those was license plate reading cameras. And so they were a valuable tool in bringing justice to an individual who is causing great harm to many residents in the city of Milwaukee, many residents who asked us to do something. The second example I want to give is that in the news, right along the same time, there was a city employee who was shot while they were on duty for carjacking.

In that case, license plate readers, flock cameras led us to the suspect vehicle and we're able to apprehend those who caused great harm to the city through violence. And we were tasked with the urgency of finding somebody who shot at one of our city employees and license plate reading cameras were integral in that investigation. Used correctly, they are a valuable tool and this department will not back away from that position because we really believe in it. That being said, we also recognize that we can do a great deal of harm to the public trust if mis used. And we had a recent example where that occurred by the hands of one of our employees.

What we will say as a department is the second we became aware, we acted swiftly to hold that member accountable and that member is no longer part of this department because that is not how we want to use these tools. Since that time, we have implemented a number of things and James is going to go over them with this body and with the public. And what I want to say to that is we do our very best and when those who cause harm, including our own, our member caused harm to the public trust, our members caused that member caused harm to this department, we hold them accountable for that behavior and we will not stand behind it. So we agree with the public and we agree with the comments here that the misuse should never occur. I'm

going to

turn over to James, but I also just want to say from the department's perspective, having a risk manager is a great thing for us in all kinds of ways. But in this way, James has really taken the lead on taking a deep dive into all of the different things we can implement to ensure the appropriate use of our flock and license plate reader cameras and ensure that appropriate auditing is occurring on a regular basis to make to do our very best that it's always being used appropriately. We can make no guarantees that there isn't going to be a person doing a bad thing anywhere, including in our own department. But what we can guarantee is we're going to do everything in our power, to be able to implement the tools to find those individuals who are causing harm and to hold them accountable for that behavior. So thanks to James.

Thanks to all that he brings to the department in risk management. And this is just one example of the many ways that he makes us better. James.

Thank you very much. And thank you members of the commission for hearing this file and giving us an opportunity to explain some of the responses to the letter that the common counsel added to this file. I just want to set the stage a little bit about what this presentation is. This presentation is an attempt at a line by line response to the questions posed for the questions and the topics posed that relate to the department. Some of that letter, as you'll recall from reading it, direct the FPC to do certain things or speak to oversight in a way that isn't appropriate necessarily for the department to opine on.

So I've done my best to sort of parse that out and look at the questions to so that we can show this body, the common counsel and also anybody who may be watching the steps that we've taken to mitigate risk to ensure that the use of our Albert systems is compliant with policy and is doing the best public service that it can and leveraging the public safety technology that it provides. So I'm going to go through those questions right now and then at the end, I'm happy to answer any questions that I can. I'm also happy to provide follow-up if there's questions that I'm unable to answer from the top of my head, but I will do my best. Thank you. First, this is a little zoomed in.

Okay. Well, I'll read specific training is provided before anyone is granted access to the department's ALPRA and similar technology? The answer to that is that we had turned off all of the use of FROC in February. And before any users were admitted back into the system, they were required to undergo a training from the captain of the Fusion Division. A video was produced for that training.

There is an emphasis on associating each query with a valid and accurate CAD or case number. That is reflected in our policy. It is an important piece tying the query to some function of public safety. That is the requirement of the policy and that is what the members have been retrained on. I'll also point to we have an ALPR user agreement.

This is republished here. But this is the agreement that any member who said, yes, I want to be a police officer who has FOC access was required to go line by line and initial these things. But what those what this user agreement sets forth is that the purpose will be for legitimate law enforcement purpose that whenever there is a query made that it will have an accurate CAD or case number that the system can be revoked from the member's access at any time for any reason. Number four is that they have read and understand the procedure expectations of the SOP and that they understand that their use of the system needs to be compliant with that policy. Also number five, this is one that I came up with that if you're asked to make an ALPOR query for another member, member, you are responsible for the workup of that file as if it is your own query.

So the accuracy of the information submitted for the query is the responsibility of the submitting officer. And then number six is more of just a reminder, but its violations of this agreement or the policy are subject to discipline. The member then signs it. The member's commander basically vouching for that member then signs it. Those members who submitted those are then vetted again by Fusion before they are allowed access to the ALPR technology.

That vetting includes whether or not they have incidents misconduct that would make it inappropriate for their use. We were sensitive to that. And so Fusion goes through those applications not just for this policy, but also for the right people using this technology given we know how what it can do when misused. So the next question is how is ongoing use supervised in real time and who is responsible for reviewing searches and access logs?

James, I'm sorry. Don't know if there's text that's cut off, but I think if you hit escape on the keyboard, that'll take it out of slideshow mode and maybe that'll be a little easier Is to that better?

That better for folks?

I don't know.

Give it a shot.

I see it.

Okay. Well, all right. So the question is how is ongoing use supervised in real time and who is responsible for reviewing searches and access logs. So the baseline question of that is the work location supervision. So that's your frontline supervisor. They are primarily responsible for the review of queries. When we send an audit to a work location, what we are asking that frontline supervisor to do is to supervise their members use in a way that is leveraged by the data that we've gained from the audit. And so that's the first line of defense against this. We also have systems controlled by the Intelligence Fusion Division. This is where the system is housed.

They are the entity of our department that is primarily responsible for the administration and oversight of the use of this technology. Also we have a section called the compliance management section. It's a section that I oversee. We provide supervisors with lists of queries that are subject to audit. We also do follow ups.

So there are times where the audit will project to me something that says this is of concern and I pose it to supervision to say what happened here and I am looking for a specific response. And if the response that I'm getting from supervision doesn't match with my expectation, what I then do is say what was the reason provided for this outcome that sort of deviates from what I would expect and is it rational, is it reasonable, did I learn something more that I didn't know before or is this something that merits more follow-up and the need for removal or for referral to discipline, which I will cover through these questions. How frequently are audits conducted and are they proactive or only triggered after a complaint? So the regular cadence for our audits is a monthly cadence. There is a good reason for that and I will get into it in a little bit, but it has to do with building the data set so that you can trend patterns over time.

Within that monthly cadence, however, if a complaint is received by MPD, whether it be through a district location, through IAD or if the FPC were to alert us to a complaint that says for some reason the complaint implicates flock, we would review immediately what that complaint sets forth, including doing a deep dive query into that plate to see whether or not it's been compliant and it's associated with a case, whether or not the nature of the complaint and the substance of that context matches what our documentation is or is not. And then the results from that would be a very swift investigation. We have not received any complaints. I did check with IAD before making this presentation. There were none of record that we're aware of.

However, if we did receive those, we would not wait for the monthly cadence to happen. We dive right into it. What disciplinary policies exist violations and are they consistently enforced? So like I said on that user agreement for the Alpers system, it has an explicit acknowledgment that misuses or violative uses are subject to discipline. Our discipline matrix, which the commission is very aware of, does ensure consistency and enforcement.

We also have our statutory framework for meeting out any discipline, must meet the standards, the seven standards of just cause and that's by statute. And then I want to highlight two core values. And so these core values are guiding principles that all members must abide by. And the first of that is a competency core value. It's a 104 and that means that police investigations must be based at a minimum on reasonable suspicion over the occurrence of an actual or possible criminal offense.

All investigations shall be conducted and reports prepared in a prompt, thorough and partial and careful manner to ensure accountability and compliance with the law. A second core value that is applicable to these types of searches is another competence core value and it's a 105, which is that all department members should be familiar with department policies, procedures and training and then expected to conduct themselves in full accordance with them. We have a robust SOP on this use. So anybody who violates that specific SOP is could be disciplined under a 105. But that 104 competency piece, I think you'll see it a little bit later in the presentation.

But when we require officers to make investigations that are based on reasonable suspicion or the actual occurrence of a crime, what we're saying is that in order to use the ALPERS system and this is in the user agreement, it must be for a legitimate law enforcement purpose. And that ties back to 01/2004 in, well, what does that mean? That means that you have to be able to articulate what you have. You have to be able to document what you have. All of that's in our policy as well.

But when it comes to discipline, the charges that you would expect to see for misuse of this just off the top line, not taking into the context of anything else that may have happened or the circumstances, all come back to this competency core value. So you may have further things that could be implicated in any given or particular case but the misuse of not associating this with that bare minimum standard of what law enforcement investigations are supposed to be based on tie directly back to this and that's the disciplinary framework that we use and the commission and any of you who have heard discipline are familiar with how these core values, that's where the charges stem from and then we test them against the seven standards of just cause and the disciplinary matrix ensures that over time discipline that's meted out appears consistent and whether or not it's appropriate in any given case to deviate from what we call comparable cases. So that's just kind of a high level explanation of that. What safeguards are in place to ensure those systems are not used for immigration enforcement without a judicial warrant? This is the three sort of paragraphs here that I have.

These are direct quotations from our SOP 130. But what they get at are they set forth that immigration enforcement is not the job of Department. Immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government. And we do not unilaterally undertake immigration enforcement. We don't routinely inquire into immigration status.

And we also have a note for our officers that most immigration violations are civil and fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government. So local law enforcements have no right to arrest in those matters. That again ties back to that competency of 01/2004 and having a legitimate lawful purpose for making any query of a Albers system. Again, when you're talking about immigration, civil immigration specifically, which is what this covers without a judicial warrant, you would be violating SOP, you would be violating the user agreement and you would be violating our immigration policy if you make queries immigration. Again, we can't arrest or detain for immigration violations of the law and we explicitly say that administrative warrants are non criminal, they're not signed by a judge and they can't be used by any department members as the basis to detain or arrest a person.

How is the city ensuring compliance with local policies, state law and constitutional protections regarding data access and surveillance? This question that was posed is a very broad one and so I want to hit on some of the local things that we are charged with as a department as far as surveillance goes but also we have state and federal oversight outside of this body that audit and hold us compliant for any use of data. So in our CJIS compliant that happens on both a state and a federal level. There are plenty of stories of local agencies, not MPD, that when you don't comply with those federal audits and you don't pass those federal audits, they take away basically the information and access sharing. So we as an agency use also our Wiley AG accreditation which dovetails into the exact type of policies that CJIS compliance tries to get you at, which are that you have systems and metrics and accountability in place that says if you're going to have a policy that you measure and you comply with it, but also that if you're going to make access to surveillance systems that you're abiding by those rules as well.

I also want to point out that per local ordinances, Milwaukee City ordinances in multiple different chapters across across the city. The certain surveillance equipment, cameras and things like that are required to be at certain premises. We have a license investigation unit. Are present at most licensing hearings and they talk about compliance or noncompliance with those requirements of those ordinances. And then finally with constitutional protections, I just want to set the stage.

I did do a little bit of research before we came here because I wanted to see how the Seventh Circuit has provided guidance whether Wisconsin Supreme Court or appellate courts have issued public opinions on those. The information is pretty limited given that this Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is relatively new in the scheme of the history of our country. But a quote that I found that then ended with like a nine citation string site is that there's nearly uniform consensus of courts that have evaluated the constitutionality of Alpers and held that their uses are not Fourth Amendment searches requiring warrants probable cause. That helps bridge the gap between policy and then what we might expect from Fourth Amendment jurisprudence where our policy is requiring us to have that minimum level of police investigations tying to probable cause, tying to reasonable or excuse me, tying to reasonable suspicion or the occurrences of crimes, that's where this system falls in. So when we're talking about compliance with the constitutional protections, we do have to look to the courts because the courts are what guide our decisions here.

And so we don't have any case law on point that says is these are clear Fourth Amendment violations and the string sites that support this aren't just from the Seventh Circuit but they're from all across our country. All right. Now getting into the MPD audit and review. So we have our monthly Alpers audit and we've increased our audit in robustness. I can say since we started addressing this in early twenty twenty six, one of the problems that I saw with previous audit system was that it necessarily wasn't tied to some sort of data point that's saying where should you look.

When you have lots of points of data, sorting that data and making sense of it before you do a deep dive is a really good way to ensure that you're making like if you're looking for a needle in a haystack that you're being directed where to look and not just saying, well, I saw something over here and I didn't find it. So the things that we kind of looked at were number one, the system itself, the vendor, the technology doesn't didn't have a great way of doing audit. I'm pretty sure that they're trying to get better at that, but we couldn't wait around for a software system to improve. And so I recruited a team of analysts from our OMAP division. And so when Heather gave me for this, I really can't take credit other than being like a general contractor because so many people worked on this to get this audit into a place where it really does let us leverage it.

And we do we identify outliers, we look at volume trends, we look at patterns, we look at Z scores, which is just a mean of means and getting you standard deviations to say this looks weird against either other people or this individual officer. We also were able to sort data using our alphanumeric case system to see if you're submitting a case number, is it meeting that bare minimum alphanumeric pattern of what we would expect a case number to look like. And if it's not, we want to be having our supervision take a deeper look at that to see why that might be. So that's kind of like the high level what we did with it. When I talk about outliers, we have three major categories of outliers that for us that compliance management triggers, these are the cases you should look at.

So we have our case number outliers. So when our Z score is higher than three, that's always an indicator. That's three standard deviations away from what we usually expect or like the average of how someone is using it. There's a lot of reasons why a case number might become a high Z score. A high Z score on its own doesn't tell you much about anything other than this is the place to start to look.

A homicide suspect case number is going to have a lot of queries in it. There's going to be a lot of people looking at it and working those cases. A district level robbery will have less. That's just the nature of the division of work and the way that our department investigates things. But when we look at those things, another thing I like to look at is if it's only one officer in that case number and the Z score is really high, that tells you that there's something to look at there.

Because if the Z score is really high, that means a lot of things are happening in that case. But if it's just one officer, that doesn't tell me much more other than, okay, there's probably a really good reason for this or there's something to look at. We want the supervision to unpack that high Z score with one officer to be able to tell us, okay, this was what happened in this case. And in most of the cases what we're looking at there, like the most common thing that will get you that outlier is a critical missing person with a known license plate where the officer is going to be refreshing that page multiple times over in the same day in that shift because they are looking for that car because an abduction happens, somebody is missing, there's an alert for that car and they want to find it. Another way in case numbers we look at this is if there's 10 or more queries by an officer.

So what that means is associating multiple plates into a case number. There's reasons for that in investigations. Sometimes the actors don't act alone or that there's multiple victims, multiple suspects and we're trying to figure out what happened here. But there's always that is another data point that you can use to say what is this? We need to unpack it and look a little bit more at it.

The other thing is that when we have case numbers that are being queried for twenty five days or more, that's kind of why this monthly cadence is really helpful because typically a twenty five day or more case is going to be a more involved investigation. Officers who are spending that amount of time on that type of investigation, We would expect to see supplemental reports. We would expect to see detailed investigations into why this is happening. So that's another outlier that can happen. That was a lot but like the same concept happens with license plates.

And so if you have one officer searching a plate, that is indicative potentially of either misuse or something where this officer is assigned and there's a reason for it. So another thing I want to add to this, when we were building this audit, we certainly looked at the officers use that triggered this misconduct. Like we were aware of this pattern and how this happened. That certainly helps inform what is it that you want to look for when you find volatile use. Unfortunately, our department has a use case for that and so unpacking it and finding that, okay, well when one officer searches a plate over a period of time and they're the only officer looking at it and it hits a high Z score, there's something there.

Usually what we're expecting to see is some report that says why that is, an explanation of it. But again, so we lower the threshold for five or more queries by an officer to be like after that point that's something I want a supplemental or an initial report. I want it very clear about what this is. And again that twenty five day or more pattern and so if you keep looking for this car, we need to see what case number it's associated with so we can figure out why. The other and last sort of area, this is certainly like if we had proprietary product here, this would be the one that I would say is incredibly powerful and made by our OMAP team.

This is the assessment of officers searches of case numbers and plates against their own pattern in searches. And so if you're an officer who when you get assigned a case or if you see something, you search that card two or three times and then one day you search something 40 times. That makes your own use of really high Z score against your own regular patterns. So we establish these patterns over time of how do these officers usually do cases and then measure high Z scores against that individual metric. And there are officers who by the nature of their assignment have high volumes and there are officers who don't.

And so when those things ping, we want to know about that because it's outside of the typical expectation that we have for that officer. And that tool over time gets better because patterns and trends change over time and that tool will allow you to see how that pattern changes.

Kendra Christensen is the OMAP supervisor that was instrumental in all of this work. She's amazing.

You must give her credit. So the other this is less of a question. This gets more into the high level bullet points of the letter. So what the letter asked was for purpose limited tied to documented casework. Our answer for that is tying and associating those plates to some sort of documented report or case or CAD number in our own record system that ensures that supervision has that opportunity when it's directed to them to be able to say, I know what happened here.

You don't want to be having to unpack those things from months past or weeks past without having a case number to associate it to because people forget. And so the whole point of having a case or CAD to tie it to is so that when you are reverse engineering the query, you have a lot of different information points that you can tie things back to. And again, our user agreement requires that this plate association must happen.

James, quick question. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the SOP on this said that the audits would be conducted at the district level. The reason why I ask is, it sounds a little complicated and I mean that in a good way, but who is doing the audits?

Is it? So it's dual track because let me go back to that slide. So the work location receives from compliance management section what they should look at. The work location, the district then dives into that and tells us what it is.

Got it.

So instead of having the work location say, hey, make sense of this sort of complex data sorting and use all this leverage system, what we do is we prepare a spreadsheet of the user, the district work location, the plate number we want them to look at, the case number we want them to associate it against and then we also make notes about, like I said, what our expectations for that thing may be. And so that way we kind of keep track of why we picked it. So sometimes it's outlier, sometimes it's this case number doesn't match exactly what's going on with it. We want to keep that in line so that we can when we get the things back and we're testing out what the supervision said about it, that it gels with what our expectation was at the beginning.

Thank you.

That's very So the division of labor is no, we can't do this all alone. It is a team effort. I believe it was on Slide 11. Flagging and supervisory escalation. So we basically have two sort of independent things that can they're not mutually exclusive.

Our recommendation for removal is a process that is an administrative process. When we see things in the data that say, yes, that falls below the expectations, that's certainly not a case number, that's you're not going to be able to walk this one back, you put that case number in there and it's not right, it doesn't work. We can administratively remove a user and that's in the agreement that they can be revoked at any time. Discipline also requires that why. So if the why is, well, okay, the member transposed a number in this, that's going to look a lot different than the member didn't know what they did when we talked to them, right?

That member is going to be investigated for discipline. The member who may have added an extra digit to this 10 alphanumeric code wouldn't necessarily expect discipline unless this becomes a pattern over time. So that is how we flag those things. Supervision then gives us some of that context for it. And then either an internal can happen, a policy review at the district level can happen or we can take some administrative action to preserve the system.

And then one of the recommendations in this was a clear firewall for immigration enforcement. So just reminding again like this does tie back to our SOP at one hundred thirty. So you can't use immigration status as a basis for a criminal investigation. We explicitly prohibit civil enforcement of administrative immigration policies. So there is actually a policy governing this and again we have our core value that I tie it back to. And I believe that that is going to answer the questions in the letter that were pertinent to MPD. So thank you for bearing with me. I'm certainly happy to entertain questions. I don't know, Madam Chair, how you want to facilitate that, but happy to answer.

Well, I'll start by asking the questions I have. You, indicate that the Fusion Division is doing the training. I think the public should know what is the Fusion Division, who is in it, what do they do?

Sure. So the Intelligence Fusion Division is a division of our criminal investigations bureau. So they are a entity. They have sworn and civilian employees in it. They work with like in the pole camera operators, they work with crime analysts and mapping and trends and things like that.

The fusion division is basically like where all the information comes together and then it's made sense of and it informs how we deploy directed patrol missions, crime strategies and districts and also looks for threat assessments and things like that. So there's a lot of things happening in Fusion. That's where the software landed and some of the oversight from it has shifted away from that entity which is more of an operational entity into the compliance management section which is more of an administrative oversight body better prepared to handle those types of things.

Is are all members of the Fusion Division MPD employees?

No. I don't believe so.

Who else is employed in the Fusion Division?

Well,

I don't know the exact number or the breakdown of it but I believe that the Southeastern Wisconsin Terrorist Threat Assessment Network, the STACK, works out of the Fusion Division. They're not our employees though. So all of the MPD employees who have access to our MPD systems are either sworn or civilian employees within MPD.

So these non MPD individuals who are working at the Fusion Division, do they have access to the automatic camera reading No.

Our members, the only members who have access have an milwaukee.gov email address. Are our employees and any employee who works as a task force officer or something like that from any other entity, they're not granted into our network access. And when we purged it, we ensured that that was part of who we would have we looked for that. We wanted to make sure that that was not happening because we were sensitive to the data sharing stories from other agencies. We're sensitive to a federal officer having access could have the appearance of, okay, we're crossing over lines here into the things that we're trying to hedge against, which are we don't want this to be used for immigration enforcement, we don't want this to be used outside of our department.

And so the users for it are all Milwaukee City employees.

Okay. So they have to sign the agreement and go through training and they are located the access is located in all district offices? Don't have to go downtown in order to use it?

No. Correct. It's in their MDCs which are the patrol computers.

Okay. But also to be clear, not anyone can say, sign me up. I want to do this. It has to be vetted by their chain of command and there has to be a valid reason why it's important in their work.

Okay. But it being on the computer, how do you ensure that other people don't have the ability to hack into it or access it Yes. Without

There is a multi factor authentication in order to access both the computer terminal itself. So when you turn the computer on and log in, you have your typical Microsoft access. We also our desktop computers require us to have our badge and our ID to log in. And if that is not on like this particular laptop doesn't have that but then I have to go through multifactor authentication questions to just log into the portal. And then from there to access FLOC there's similar MFA, multifactor including a you have to do a name and password, you also have to do a separate device authentication.

So like it will send you a confirmation code and then you would type that in. And these computers, all of our department computers, you can't adjust the settings to not have it time out. So they will time out if you don't have use, which is an important thing for CJIS because people do get up from their desks to do other things and I was like I want to change this because I get up and do other things and I hate having to log in every time and I asked if that could happen and they said no because it's a CGIS thing. We want to make sure that the users who log in are the users who are on the terminal.

Okay.

And James, I was just reminded that we should stop sharing. Oh,

I can do that. Thank you.

Oh, I hope so.

There you Okay. So all of this, the cameras are collecting this data and the data is going into the software and is it limitless, is it timeless, does it go on forever? What's that about?

So the only time that the department comes into the data is when it makes a query. And so the

Yeah. But does the query Yeah. Does the data go back? No. Doesn't Is it is it purged from time to time?

I I understand. Yeah. So the data that's captured by the camera exists for thirty days. Within those thirty days, if a query is made from it, a result is generated from that. But if a query is not made for that particular instance and you drove by it thirty one days ago, your information is no longer searchable in that. So I can't go back and say I'm wondering what Chair Horowitz did in February. I'm going to see if I can return me any results.

Okay. Alright. More questions, commissioners? Question.

When this pings, this FOG when you do your audits monthly, your office is the one that determines who to send to the districts. Right? Correct. And then they get a a summation. This is a problem. Well, this is a questioned query. Investigate. Correct. Because they don't have the axe they don't have the knowledge of three d d three z scores and and Yeah. Okay.

We're trying to help them look at the things that are the most concerning in data.

And this these orders every 30 days you do these audits? Correct. But what if something's happening right now? Somebody's misuse right now this week and can will that how would that will that be able to be flagged? Do you have to wait till the end of the month?

It's difficult to generate outlier data in real time like that. This is a brand new process and the amount of data and the way that we've sorted it is a lot. It's certainly something that we can look into to get more real time. But again, even what the data will the data won't necessarily tell you that there's something that's misuse or criminal happening. It's an outlier.

All it is is going to be a data point that will require a like an iterative narrative process to see what's happening. So each and every time you have a search or a query come through and it associates to one thing or another, there's a few more layers of work you've got to get to before you can make a heads or tails and a judgment call about whether or not this was consistent with policy. And so no amount of data sorting is ever going to tell you other than plainly they didn't use a case number. That's something that could tell you. But even that on its own doesn't necessarily reflect that's that criminal officer who did that thing.

The ways that I've seen it come through both before and after this audit process have been cases where they've made inputs that just aren't the right one, like you put a case number C27. Well, that's a twenty twenty seven case. That number is going to be wrong because it doesn't associate yet, but the six is right next to the seven. And so that can happen.

How long have

you been doing these audits? With this data leveraged approach, we've been we've took the month of March and the month of April. So we built it in January and February and our systems tested it in February as that took the longest amount of time to see, am I generating this? And what we did was we compared it with uses of known instances of violations to see, okay, I know where that violation exists in the big main data set. Is my audit going to push it to me? That was my big concern is am I building this thing in a way that actually generates the lead that I want.

Okay. Just knowing the workload of the supervisors, is there a follow you you send this out to the sergeants of the district, those who are getting it, right? Those are doing the investigations. Right? The sergeants, not

Correct.

Not the lieutenants. That's my question. Is what is their reply

I talked with the sergeant today about it, actually. He said this is way easier than what we were doing before because it's giving them exactly where to look. It's telling them exactly what to do. And so before the audit was really like pulling your really randomization. There's some power to randomization. Randomization is not on its own a bad thing, but when you're dealing with really specific rules and guardrails and you can use data in a way that says here's where you should look, here's where you're to find the most noncompliance, which we're trying to detect. That's what we want to know as the department is who's not doing this the right way, why are they not doing it the right way, is it something we can remediate through training, or is this something that needs discipline or both?

And not a question of names, but numbers. Are you looking at do you have a monthly number that we're looking at outliers?

In what way? I'm sorry.

The of claims.

Total number of outliers? Yeah. Last month. It varies probably roughly 70 on that so far. Okay.

But again, those outliers are for a variety of reasons including typos.

Yes. I mean, they're and you said they're easily investigated, but that's 70 throughout all seven districts. Divisions and Yep.

The confusion and everybody else has access

The investigative departments. Correct.

Thank you. That's it. Thanks. Madam Chair, can I ask a brief follow-up to Commissioner Yes? Burgos' I understand that real time flagging and supervision is difficult if not impossible.

But to

the issue of someone entering failing to use a case number or report number or CAD number, is there any technological reasonable way that that could get pinged? Notice earlier than within a month. I'm just I don't know if

that's realistic or possible but I've asked the question to the vendor and the vendor has said no. What I requested from them was don't accept what isn't our correct alphanumeric number. They said, we don't really have functionality for that. And so the answer from what the department and what we're trying to look into as well is like a more real time way of doing that. Yeah.

The pulling all of this data is a very momentous thing and it will this data this report, this audit will change over time when we identify the outliers of today might not be the outliers of tomorrow and we want to have this thing be fluid to be able to catch those. I don't know the data based solution to build towards that, but it's certainly something that we can work on. Okay. I will say that's not to say that those things are never going to get caught. They will.

Yes. We'll see it later, but it will be a few weeks removed from the actual instance. And again, that being an outlier doesn't suggest that there's 70 officers who are going to get referred for misconduct in public office. That's not what that is. All that's saying is you're searching this in a way that goes beyond the average of averages. We might want to look at that.

Thank you.

Okay. I have one follow-up question of my own. When you said that the data is really only available for thirty days, whatever?

Not the data. Reading. The reading. So like what the camera is reading every day of what's passing it is available for thirty days.

Okay. Our data that we keep on the logs of who's accessing what.

That's I see.

Okay. All right. And that has to be associated with a an investigation with the case.

That is our policy and that is what we're measuring against when we audit. Okay.

Thanks. Are we just going down the line? Yes.

Okay. I should. Go

I guess just a follow-up question to commissioner Burgos' question. When you said that there were, 70, about 70 outliers last month, which I understand are not 70 instances of misconduct, what percentage is that of searches? Like, how many searches occurring per month?

I ran rough numbers on this. It's roughly about 15% of total queries is what ends up in my audit. So I think and I don't want to talk past you on this because like there's two different numbers at play here. So there's an instance which is a use case and then within that instance of the use case, there's a certain number of queries made. And so if I type in a plate number and a case number and I hit go, that's one.

And if I hit go again because I want to see if it's passed that, that's two. And so that number of times I've hit the button also factors into whether it's outlier use because that we consider those each and every one of that button hit being a separate independent thing that needs support. And so of those 70, the number of times the button was hit was higher and that's what that sort of 15 roughly percent number is, is the button hitting.

And I want to make clear for the commission and the public why would you press the button over and over again if you're not up to no good. For critical missing, it's a tool that can be utilized say if we have a plate number of an individual has taken a child, we want to continuously refresh And somebody on that investigation might not usually do it. They become an outlier and we look into it and that was their investigation.

Just That happened with the worker at DNS who was placarding the apartment that didn't have working sprinklers trying to save those lives and got shot at. Multiple officers at the same time are looking for that. So the the queries for that plate kind of generate outlier data. But when you look back at it, you go, okay. Multiple officers from multiple districts and shifts are looking at this car.

That gives me a high degree of confidence that there's a law enforcement purpose behind this as opposed to when it's just one officer looking at it, which still have a degree of confidence but it's not as high as when you have all these different sort of independent places generating towards that in a discrete period of time. That tells you a lot more about why it's an outlier than when it's one. And when it's one, that's one that might end up on my list of like, hey, district, you're going to want to look at

Okay. That makes sense. If one person's looking for something over and over again, they might be stalking. If a lot of people are looking, hopefully, they're not collective stalking.

Yeah. I think the amount of power that it would take to, like, create that is wow. Okay.

And then just a follow-up question to to Cher Horowitz's question about Stack. Did Stack have access No. Before? No. Okay. Because there are things that come up on haveibeenflocked.com, which is, like, the result of open records request that are saying that they're from Stack in Milwaukee.

Yes. So when we looked at the verified users, we did not find any members who were Stack members in there. We have members who are whose role is also works with Stack, but we weren't doing it in a way that Stack members who weren't MPD members have access, if that makes sense. And so whenever you have a task force or anytime you have government sharing entities or resources, the employee on the task force or the team is the employee of our agency. So it's our MPD officer.

They're subject to our rules. They're also subject to additional rules outside. But the rules of FBI, for example, don't supersede our policies. And where there's conflict, this is why we have contracts with them, our policies govern. So especially when it comes to body cam, task force officers across this country who work for the FBI aren't required by the FBI necessarily to have body cam.

Ours are. You can't be a task force officer and be in a patrol led task force without body cam. That's our policy. And we don't allow MOUs to be created without those types of guardrails in it. We also have guardrails in those policies that say you will do no Section eight enforcement, which is of the immigration code that you're not to be used in any way, shape or form for it and that it can end the agreement itself. And so we have some protections that are built into that system, but no members who had access to our system, our network were stack members.

Okay.

Excuse me, employed by an agency who's not MPD.

Okay. So it's the most likely situation that those searches that are coming up as stack are MPD officers in

Port to connect too. Like, if you wanna I I I'm aware of have ibeenflocked.com. I've been through it. I've put my plates through

it.

And so if you can, like, just show me that too, may be able to unpack that a little better than what I'm saying right now.

Okay. Yeah. That would be really helpful. Because this is the first, I guess, time that we're sort of substantively talking about this, I do just have some questions about the process before. One of the main reasons why I asked for this item to be added was because I heard and assumed that there were changes that the department made after this very public situation of misuse. So I am kind of, in some ways, also looking for a little before and after Sure. How we got here. In the past, when members were requesting access to get their flock login, that's how it worked. Right?

Yes.

What was the process for vetting that? Like, how many folks were denied?

I don't have the exact number of how many folks were denied. The process was relatively the same just without the user agreement that I put forward there. That's a document that I drafted after we built this audit to say, hey, if anyone is going use it, I want them to use it in a way that is auditable and these are the rules. There were trainings put on by the department. There were also things called training the trainer, which are not paying for a flock representative or a vendor representative to come out to the department every time a new user is granted access, but to have trainers within the department who have been verified and trained to say to the next person, this is how this system works, this is how it's supposed to be used.

I think for consistency's purposes, right, you want to have a sort of a one voice, one sound training perspective to it, which is why we've done this additional video just to say to folks, this is really the emphasis and the bread and butter of queries in this program. If you're going to use it, it must be like this so that we are able to do some sort of substantive audit. So I think that's an area where we would we've made an improvement over time. It was not great before. It's better now.

Okay. Forgive me if this already came up for you guys in public safety, but I wasn't there that day. How many officers had access before and how many have access now?

The rough number I've got for that is I believe it was roughly three seventy or what is what we had officers at before. I remember it being under 400. Right now, it's just over 100. So we've made a significant reduction. There are members who continue to write for it.

There were some members who I think reluctantly waited just to sort of see what happens, right? Whenever something seismic like this happens in a department, you might want to be like, I'm going to hold off and just not throw my name in right away and see what happens. So we still have people who are making applications. We also will see an increase in the number of supervisors who get access to it. A push we're making is for supervisors in patrol to create accounts for the purpose of audit.

I mean a lot of them are saying, I just don't I don't want flock because I don't need to search. And my response is, yeah, but you need it to supervise. So we're gonna get you into there. So we do expect that number to go up. But the big thing is is really just vetting everybody and having some sort of signed acknowledged agreement that they understand what they're supposed to be doing so that if their conduct falls below expectations, we can tie anything back to you asked for this, you wanted to be a part of this, you said you would do it. Here's your name, your signature, your initials. Now we can hold you accountable if you fall short.

Okay. Thank you. And then and you'll audit the supervisor's use?

Oh, any user. Okay. Any user who there's no distinction if you make a use. Like when I look through it, it's not controlled by rank. So if a captain were to make a flock query, it would come up and get sorted in my data. There's no distinction between rank.

Okay. Great. And then can you just say a little bit more, was the audit process before, was that like a random selection?

Yes. It certainly was more randomized. It happened at the work location level. It wasn't sort of centrally directed other than do it, like to tell someone, hey, you've got to do this monthly. The direction that we wanted to take with that or least that I saw with it was there's this great opportunity to use data sorting to be able to tell folks where to look.

And especially if you're looking at something and you go, okay, well, I know that this person is really good at this system. So if I audit them, my audit is probably going look really good. I want our supervisors looking at the people who aren't our best and are making mistakes because that's where we should be. We should be working in areas of noncompliance to try to bring people into compliance. We shouldn't be just saying like, well, here's the A students so everyone here can do really well. That doesn't really carry the day. So that's kind of what I the purpose of directing them to do it is to avoid, well, it's random, but also I know that this person's really good.

Sure. Okay. And then were there other instances of misconduct that were found by those audits?

I don't believe so through those audits. No.

Okay. Were there other instances of misconduct that were found outside of those audits, outside of the big one that we know about?

So, like, when you like, yes. There have been instances where the case numbers don't match up and, like, that's I guess, when you say misconduct, are you talking about, obviously, criminal charges and all of that? Like, right now, we're aware of the one. I don't think that it's fair really to say, like, sometimes if you transpose a number, that that's a violation. But

Sure. And that's not really what I'm worried about. I guess, you know, maybe miss misconduct isn't necessarily the word that you would use to describe this, but were there any findings of officers using the search function for something that was not tied to a case at all, for example?

So I will disclose to this body there is investigation pending, but I can't disclose any other information at this time.

The Okay.

And we will find out about that Yes. When the investigation 100%. Yes. Okay. Is are you able to tell me when that flagged for you?

I don't know.

I would have to go back and look into that, and I will get that back to you. But yes.

Okay. Thank you. When an officer searches something in Flock, I understand that the department has, is it 31 cameras in the city?

I believe so.

Okay. So there's there's, an interconnected network that also searches. Is that a current understanding?

Correct.

How many devices are being I

don't know that off the top of my head. I can certainly get that to you, though.

Okay. Okay. I would appreciate that. There was mention of the fact that flat cameras can become, I guess, for lack of a better term, video enabled. Sure. Are any No. Okay.

I'm assuming your question was going to be are any of our cameras or any of ours in our network video enabled? I didn't mean to cut you off. Yes. That's fine. The answer is no. The answer is our Alpers cameras only do Alpers. They don't do anything else. There are no cameras in our system that are Alpers cameras that are dual purpose or have FRT or have placement in places that are not the roadway. I know we heard in public comment about some gymnasium. That's we don't have any of those and that is not something that even if they were offered for free to us that we would be interested in, it defeats the purpose of what it is. And the purpose for what it is, is to read plates.

Yes. And I think that was not an instance necessarily of that police department being sketchy. It was an instance of flock being sketchy.

Either way, it's our cameras are designed how they were sold to us, which is this reads license plates. We have other pole cameras. We have, like I spoke about before, there are requirements by ordinances for other surveillance cameras that we sort of keep track of as far as license compliance and things like that. But as far as the flock cameras or Alpers cameras, however you want to call them, being transformed into something that they're not, that's not happening here.

Okay. I appreciate that. And this is probably an obvious question, but does the department have any intention of turning on video functions?

No. No. Okay.

Thanks. You mentioned that the cameras are all in the roadways. How were the locations selected?

I don't have that information. I didn't prepare for that question, so I don't know. I believe that there was a news story of that, but, like, where they are. I thought Brian Paulson may have done something on

Yeah. I think there's one about where they are, but not necessarily, like, what was the process

I don't have that answer

for you. I could prepare that answer, though, and get it to you.

Okay. Usually, when I have this many questions, I will send them ahead of time. I did not

this We're going not anywhere.

Okay. And then has anyone, I guess, moving on to this period of time, you mentioned, obviously, there's sort of this new user agreement and the increased threat that someone might get removed from the system. Has anyone been removed yet?

I did remove two users based off of the April audit.

Okay. And that to me is a good thing. It means that piece

Yes. Of the functions Once were

the audit comes back so the audit for April is going out. And once that audit comes back, once I get the deep dive of, like, what actually happened here, I've got some flags for I've got follow-up for these things. So depending on what the supervisors find and what is written and then what I go and find, There may be more. Again, though, these are cases where the case number that was entered doesn't match the expectation and so they have to figure out what that is but we're still going to have them do that. But we're also saying on the front end, the officer didn't meet the expectation of the agreement. So even if there is a good reason for it, we're not gonna have you a part of this anymore.

Okay. That makes sense. Just a couple more things. I'm almost done. So I have never seen the back end of FLAC. So it's my understanding that there's you put in, like, a little search term or search justification in some type of field that sometimes says a case number historically looking at have I been flocked. Yeah. That would sometimes say a case number. It would sometimes say a really vague word like investigation. It would sometimes seem to have, like, some sort of little code phrase in there. I guess, can you explain to me what that field looks like and what the intended function is of that?

Yeah. So when you're seeing returns in have I been flocked that don't have case numbers, again, have I been flocked is a multistate database so we can't speak to any of that. But if it didn't have a case number in it, that's something that falls below our expectation. We wouldn't want that. We want our returns in any sort of audit to have that case or CAD number that we can tie it to.

When it comes to like the reason which is it has been a dropdown in some places, it changes depending on how the user or that agency wants to do it. In our case, we have one reason for it which is investigation and then the reasoning for having a valid case number though is what is that investigation. So stating the reason, with it being public and it being real time on some of those websites telling the homicide car that they're the homicide car is not a good idea. And so we've restricted it, but we've required that the case number be something that is in our system so that we can query it. So if we go, okay, well, was an investigation with this plate, it's kind of generating outlier data.

When I type that case number into RMS, it's going to then generate a report and go, oh, this investigation or the charges or what we're looking at here is one of these very many things that we may do. And it tells us all the information that sort of completes the loop of is this a valid and compliant search or not.

Okay. That makes more sense to me now because when I looked, I didn't look at every month. I looked at November 2025 and then March year. And looking at November, the sort of, I guess, you're describing as the drop down field reason was all over the place. Yep. And then in March, it says other investigation for every single thing. Yep. So thank you for clarifying that. My last questions are just about I think it's pretty well known that I have participated in lots of protests. I continue to do that.

I'm very strong about people's First Amendment rights. Have there been any searches in MP by MPD officers that you're aware of that were targeted towards protesters?

No. And, again, crimes being the basis for making queries, even if someone were to potentially have, you know, civil unrest and and those are not crimes. Like, that's that's I don't want sorry. I may not have said that right. Civil unrest could be criminal depending on what's happening. But somebody exercising their first amendment rights, even if it's like, okay, they're jaywalking, that's not a crime. That's a municipal ordinance thing. Running flock for that would be a violation of the policy. It would be a violation of the competency. So you asked if I was aware of any.

I'm not. I wouldn't expect that. And if we did find that, that would be something that we would investigate through IAD because it's a clear misuse. So the guardrails on it say, you cannot do that. Things that you when you associate it to the case, it's got to be for a crime. The same thing with immigration. It's civil enforcement of something that is not our lane is not allowed to be used in our system. And if we find it, it's certainly an investigation through IAD. It may result in criminal charges too. Like, these are things that I think officers are getting the message too. Like, this can end your career if you're screwing around in it. Don't screw around in it and we will find you.

Okay. Yes. And I would hope that the answer would be no, but I still had to ask. I did note I I don't think our I think our SOP, like, clearly there is the foundation that you should not use it that way. That's not part of a criminal investigation.

But I have seen other SOPs that sort of state more explicitly do not use this for immigration purposes and do not use this for First Amendment protesting. So I understand that amongst SOP one thirty and the codes of conduct, there's all of the scaffolding for that answer to be true. I just had to check. And then my final question, so MPD has some cars that have Alper cameras on it. Is that correct?

Yeah.

How many are there?

Well, don't know that answer either. But I can follow-up with you when I give you the network total that you asked for.

Okay. And then what is the use case for those cars?

Can you be more specific to the use case?

I guess so in my mind, yeah. Like, if you're looking for

Okay. We have them as it's another tool. The total number of users who are have access to that, though, the universe is very small. They are for investigations that are led by the Criminal Investigation Bureau and I think that the use cases are relatively similar to the static flock camera. The only difference is that it moves around.

So you don't have one fixed point like saying, oh, it's this intersection that's got flock. It's where that car goes. And so in patrol, in a day in patrol, moving around is going to give you potentially different reads than what are going to get. So it's a complement to the system, but it's not a static one place in time thing.

Okay. So I guess when I say use case, I'm looking for is the purpose to drive the car somewhere where you don't have a flat camera and park it there to see if something passes or to drive around and more consistently collect the license plates as you drive around?

Well, there so there are cars in patrol, patrol and so wherever that squad is assigned for that day, our city is broken into districts and sectors. And so wherever that squad goes, whether it's dispatched or they're having unobligated time and they're self, you know, going around and driving, that's what it's catching. And so the deployment of that car isn't, I think,

It's not for the ALPR use.

Yeah. Just

wearing So it's regular car that has an ALPR on it.

Yes. Exactly. So it's a regular patrol car. It's taking calls for service. It's responding to things. And as it's driving around, it also has alpers on it.

Okay. So then are those cars ever deployed to protests where potentially then you're capturing capturing the license plates of parked protesters?

That's a difficult one to answer because, like, sometimes a car will get deployed but not with the specific purpose of, like, hey, Alper's, like, let's go get that. It's more of, like, we need a squad over here so go respond to it. I don't have any specific instances that I'm aware of or that really we can say like, oh, yeah, we we have done that. That's not something that would be consistent with our policy because directing a piece of technology in a way that's inconsistent with the use of it itself would be that violation. That's not something that I've really seen though. So, no, they they just are a compliment to the car. Like how the squad camera is. Like, this there's squad cameras on every car. There's body cameras on every cop and patrol. Like, the those pieces of technology aren't like, let's get a copy of the body cam here.

It's it's just part of the squad that they're in that day.

Okay. Thank you. I think everybody's leaving because they're tired of my questions. So, I'll be done now.

No. You you had some excellent questions. So. Always. Not a problem.

I I had very few questions. I I found this to be very helpful in rounding out what we're trying to achieve and how we create an auditable approach to something that's fairly controversial to part of our community. Our challenge is finding a way to explain this to the entire community in a very concise format because for those who come out on a regular basis and just want to just point of privilege here. Wasn't chair Horowitz that brought up the question of consistent audience. It was me who brought up the question because I'm a big fan of expanding the amount of people who are involved in these discussions and finding ways to bring them in.

And so when Chair Executive Director Todd brought up the whole concept of going out to other parts of our community. That's a way of expanding audience. So it wasn't meant to demean people who are here on a regular basis, because that is your right. It's how do we get more voices involved in something that's important to all of us. So I just wanted to put that out there.

That being said, I'm really curious about how we begin to package this whole discussion so that we can do a better job of really engaging people on not just this tool, but any tools that MPD sees as useful in helping us drive safety in the city.

Yeah. So it is a really great idea to be able to parcel this information concisely in a way where it's almost like talking points where we can share the story. But the difficult thing is we want to be thorough in having these discussions. And so what's challenging for us is not to be too concise as to minimize like what we're what it is. It's a I mean, cameras and surveillance and alpers, it is a very complex topic.

And how do you make that into nuggets for just anyone to be able to take in without asking questions is really a challenge. We can try but

How many slides is the PowerPoint?

12. 12.

Do you think that's concise enough though? I don't know. I don't

I think to your comment more than your question, Commissioner Spence, like I think that we all have this shared interest in getting having more information to let us make better choices and to have more informed conversations about these things. And I think too just having listened to this public session and these public comments but also all these ones preceding it for the last several months, I think that there is a brand here in Milwaukee that we are telling the story of and a lot of times we're hearing criticisms from all across the country in these places who none of us have ever been to or know and they're not our communities and they're saying, look, this is happening here. It's concerning to us. We don't want it to happen here. How are we as the MPD responding to that?

What systems are we building? What are our goals? And even if we can't get there perfection wise, what are we keeping in mind and the considerations we take when we make decisions like this? So when I set out to build this audit, right, I've heard these public comments. I'm concerned too.

I live here too. We're humans also. We want to make sure that this product both leverages public safety that it's used in an accountable and transparent way, but also that we have a way to take users who abuse it and hold them to account. And if it means removing them from the department depending on the use, that's something that our chief is prepared to do, this department is set up to do. We want to make sure that we're as accountable as possible on those things and also evolving the conversation over time and I think that's to your point, which is we need as many voices who are thoughtful and caring about this topic to come and give us that information because that's how we get better as an entity.

Thank you.

Yes. So thank you, James. I always appreciate the opportunity to hear you present about your work if I need to be quite serious and to take your gig quite seriously. So I really appreciate this. I have a couple of questions, and then I have a whole lot of statements. So if if there is an issue, and I think you just articulated one example of this, so I just wanna confirm, the removal off the system will happen at what point when the investigation into the disciplinary stuff starts? Because that takes a while.

Yeah. Administratively, from the jump, I I had the audit downloaded on oh. So the data dump, I think, happened Tuesday. And Wednesday I actually got to look at it and today I was like, no, these we can't have these users go forward. Just not going to doesn't matter That's top end. Yes. It doesn't really matter what the answer is because even when all if all those plates come back as, yes, that was associated to this thing, the way that the case numbers were entered aren't going to they're going to generate outlier every time and the rules are really clear. Use real case numbers. Use valid case numbers. Yeah.

And what I saw in that was I'm administratively making decision. It wasn't a decision that Just I James Lewis made. I was involved with the inspector over that bureau. I was involved with the captain over that work location. I briefed it in executive briefing for individuals, We made these decisions together but they're happening very close in time to me getting that information and one of the reasons we included in the user agreement is it can be revoked at any time for any reason and that's not disciplinary on its own. That is administrative steps that we It's not discipline to get access removed.

Okay. Thank you. I just want to flag that I do have also like I think that I appreciate your questions a lot too, Commissioner Feng. I do have a concern about the use of opera cars at protests and I think that's something that needs to be talked about by this commission. It's an adjustment to the SOP that could be made that prevents those from going to protests.

I think so. I think there's like a few different lanes here, right? There's like, okay, we have flock right now regardless of whether people want it or not want it, it is here right now. So for here right now, I am very glad to hear about these adjustments to the audit process at MPD that will allow you to catch things more quickly even if they're just like oversight or abuse, whatever. Whatever it is, we can't be having it.

So I'm glad that that's adjusting that there's a much tighter group of people who are using it, all that stuff. I think that the other question, I think it's like or the other issue is that are being brought up this evening is the question whether or not flock is okay for this city at all. And also whether or not ALPRs are okay for the city at all. And. I'm pretty convinced that they're not. For a lot of reasons, inclusive of concerns about abuse. Although I do think I do. I want to be really clear like I recognize that's an improvement. That is an improvement. I think Flock is a pretty, like, crappy company in terms of the quality of the product that they've put out.

I worry a lot about the hacking situation. I do really worry about disproportionate surveillance, and I think the city should be worried too. Like, we have the settlement agreement for a reason. And so that's something the city said issues with before. So I just, I guess I want to say I do think it would make sense for this body to explore CCOPS more, which is the ACLU model of having a community advisory board that specifically focuses in on and understands police tech in a way that's really hard to do.

Like it is a it is complex. That is true. And so what we need is not fly by night sort of like you go to IACP, that's International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference, where there's all these vendors and you, like, see the shiny, cool new thing and you're like, hey, the vendor said this is awesome and so therefore, you know, we bring it back like this is a whole thing nationally with American police saying there's not chief technology officers. There's not always a good arms around, like, how to deal with this stuff. So I think having it should be structured, I don't know because I don't know enough about the details infrastructure of CCOPS, but I want to say, I would like to see a presentation if we can invite the ACLU to present on CCOPS here.

I think there could be a lot of utility to that. And I also think, like, want to recognize, like, we have the CCC, we have the FPC, like, we have a lot of this different infrastructure. If we were to set something like that up, it needs to be set up in a way that doesn't just exacerbate the confusing governance. You know what I'm saying? So I so there's a bunch of things there. I also want to flag, and I really appreciate Amanda bringing this up, like, the city needs to reconsider how it handles sole source contracts. Period. I think it's a really, like, that's a really important flag. It affects the department, but it affects lots of other city departments, I'm guessing as well. And then I just want to say, like, I've been on the commission.

I just it it I just turned four on the commission, right, in April. And I don't think because the Fire and Police Commission does not have the power of the purse with one exception, which is setting the salaries for the chief of police and chief of fire. So we, like, we have no direct line of leverage of power to contracts. I've never seen us work contract. I'm not sure it means we can't, like, make a recommendation or whatever. I'm not sure. I think that's something we need to discuss. But I, like, on the one hand, I really appreciated the letter from the common council because I thought they really laid out good questions. And I think it really informed your guys' presentation. That was useful.

I also find it weird that we're getting a letter from the body that's responsible for contracts. So like I also think in terms of like putting leverage in questions like if you want this contract terminated, the common counsel is who you need to talk to. I'm not saying you can't keep talking to us about it. You're more than absolutely welcome to. I'm not trying to do that in any way to dissuade people coming here and speaking. But in terms of the actual ability to turn that off, it's the people of the power of the purse in this town, which is the common council. So I want to flag that. I think that's it.

Can I just add one other thing? And this is more of a comment for MPD. Over the last year, there have been lots of discussions about technology and how it's been rolled out. And I'm sure that MPD doesn't want the flack on it after the fact. There's a way of getting ahead of this.

And it's really finding an approach to discuss with community before these tools are rolled out. How do we do that in a way that is not a surprise to community. I don't mind people disagreeing on whether or not a piece of technology is going to be useful in public safety. But can we do it before we actually implement?

We recognize that's the appropriate way to do it. We did it well with the AI policy. We don't have it, and we were commended when we said, Hey, thanks for having the policy first. I just want to say we in the police department are an institution. We're also human. And right, like things like facial rec is emerging technology. And I did a presentation to some student group and Jim Ozarski likened it to, he's the city clerk, to like when clouds were coming out for storage. Like, what is this cloud concept? And and like all of these different departments were kind of like doing this thing and then they're like, woah, this is like a big deal. We need to have a policy.

And I want to say to some extent that's kind of how our technology is too. Like facial rec is something that was emerging, right? Like we didn't intentionally just like let's hide this. It was coming up. People started using it.

It was a useful tool and then it expanded and there were programs and departments that were using it in a way with a policy. And so when we came and approached this body and said, hey, we've been using this thing and we really want a policy, it wasn't because we were trying to be deceitful about it. It was we recognized there needed to be a conversation and we were catching up to that emerging technology. And so for that, yeah, you know, big hey, I'll take the hit, big mistake. But it certainly wasn't an intentional deception.

And we know the better way to do it is to get ahead of it. And and so we're we're learning these lessons. These conversations about flock and issues with flock have happened after the fact that we have these systems in place. And so what we're trying to do now is balancing all those concerns in light of the fact that we have this and we believe it's useful. And how do we do that and trying to find the most robust way to audit its use to do our very best to make sure the parameters of our policy are being followed.

And there's a lot more pressure on you guys because it seems as if every other month there's another piece of technology that can intersect with public safety. The whole discussion around AI and how that interfaces with the bodies that we have on the force. Huge discussion. We don't know where that's going, but somehow, someway, we've got to engage community on what twenty first century policing is going to really look like with the intersection of all of these tools, and sort of get buy in at some level, so that we don't have these competing entities, whether it's in City Hall or outside of these walls, fighting against something that we all want, which is a safer community. How do we do that?

So it just it requires us to take a deep breath and ask, what have we learned over the last couple of years, and how do we do this better?

Yeah. I think that that's always a good consideration.

I can't hear. What the

Yeah. I want to just plug also when you talk about dialogue and opportunities for dialogue every month, there are at least seven opportunities across the entire city in every district to attend crime and safety meetings where access to a district level captain who is operating in this world every single day, working in supervision, overseeing officers is available and people can attend those meetings and bring these issues up as well. So when we're talking about forums, just coming here, I I think it's commendable to come here, but there are opportunities seven times a month at least to come and engage with the police department and have it localized too. So depending on where you live in the city, you should know who your police captain is. You should know where the district is and you should be engaged with that as well.

I think engaging in just that one forum feels a little like spinning its wheels. I think that we don't see robust attendance at those meetings. And I want to plug it because those are real opportunities. You're getting executive command staff here to tell you what's happening. If people really want to know what's going on in their individual district and raise individual district problems, the captains are available. And that's another forum. It's another way to attend and engage and make your voice heard and give feedback directly to the department. So I just want to plug that because I think I'm hearing it in public comment. I'm hearing it from the commissioners. Where do we go next?

And I hear you on that. The question is, are we getting people to think outside of the traditional boundaries of policing. I've been to the meeting at Incarnation on Keith Avenue. And I guarantee you, a lot of the people who come to that aren't thinking about these types of issues. It's not on their radar. In somehow, some way, we're just as responsible for this. We need to find ways to get these things on people's radar. We're looking at better systems. What's it going to look like? What are the pros and cons?

What are the risks? If we can do a better job on that, continuous improvement, we'll all be in a better position to offer value to the citizens of this community. So, it's not just you guys. It's all of us. Yeah. Okay.

I think we have had questions from anybody who wants to ask them.

Anyone online, yes.

Anyone,

have I missed anyone? No. Okay. All right, good. This being a communication file, we will keep this issue moving but right now we're going to keep the agenda moving. So director please proceed with the agenda. Can I take my flash drive?

Yes absolutely. And can we get a a copy of the PowerPoint?

Yeah. You can keep the flash drive.

Sure. Okay. And, Heather, are the, promoting still here?

I think we're right before then. Let me just go.

Okay. Can

we move those up?

That's what I wanted to see. Okay. Because if they're waiting, you're wanna

Yeah. That's fair.

Get them.

Yeah. They're still here.

Okay. With madam chair, with your permission Ben? Yes.

Yes. Can you grab him, Heather?

I'll get this stuff.

Your permission, we will take items nineteen and twenty out of order under the police department. Is that alright? Okay. So the next item which is under the police department is item 19, which we're taking out of order. FPC 212,519 resolution relating to the promotions of Matthew P. Bell, Christopher J. Fritz, Guadalupe Velasquez, and Craig J. Thim to the police lieutenant position.

Thank you. So if you need conversations, please have that in the outside this room so we can all hear accurately what's going on. And okay. So that's nineteen. Yeah.

You're there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Do any of the commissioners have any questions or comments regarding these proposed promotions? No? No? I I'm sure you're looking for a motion? I'm looking for discussion? Okay, then I will take a roll call vote in alphabetical order. Commissioner Virgos.

Aye.

Commissioner Evans.

Aye.

Commissioner Fang. Aye. Commissioner Spence.

Aye.

Commissioner Spencer? Aye. Commissioner World Patterson?

Aye.

And the chair votes aye. Motion carries.

Congratulations, gentlemen. And ladies and gentlemen.

Now we'll move on to the assortative function Christ.

Item 20, FPC 212,520 resolution relating to the promotion. I'm sorry?

Please continue.

Resolution relating to the promotions of Waseem Sarosha, Oscar Espatia, LL Contreras, Paul A. Minor and Jocelyn M. Kalmanson to the police sergeant position. And apologies if I mispronounced anyone's name.

Do any of the commissioners have any questions or comments regarding this item? No. No? No. No. Then I'll take a motion.

Move approval.

Second. Any discussion? No. I'll take a roll call vote in order an alphabetical order. Commissioner Burgos? Aye. Commissioner Evans? Aye. Commissioner Fang? Aye. Commissioner Spence? Aye. Commissioner Spencer? Aye. Commissioner World Patterson?

Aye.

And the chair votes aye. Motion carries.

Congratulations.

Let's go

back to the beginning.

Yes.

We have to kind of start at the beginning now.

Alright. Okay. I will now read the items under the consent agenda. After I do so, any commissioner may remove any item to the regular agenda for discussion or appropriate action. Items not removed may be adopted by general consent without debate.

Item two, FPC 212,500 resolution relating to the 04/16/2026 meeting minutes. Item three, FPC 212,502 resolution relating to the job announcement bulletin for the Carpenter IV position within the Milwaukee Fire Department. Item four, FPC 212,503, resolution relating to the job announcement bulletin for the crime scene supervisor position within the Milwaukee Police Department. Item five, FPC 212,504 resolution relating to the job announcement bulletin for the IT project coordinator position within the Milwaukee Police Department. And item six, FPC 212,505 resolution relating to the eligible list for the building maintenance supervisor position within the Milwaukee Police Department.

This concludes the consent agenda.

Would any of the commissioners like to remove any of these items from the consent agenda to the regular agenda? If there are no objections, the items on the consent agenda will be adopted by general consent. Are there objections? Hearing no objections, these items are adopted. Director, please proceed with the agenda.

I will now read the items under examination starting with item seven, FPC 212,506, resolution relating to the extension of the police sergeant eligible list. And just as background on this matter, this list was adopted in May 2024. It has a two year life cycle. So it's set to expire on May 16 this year. It is our intention to do promotional exams on a two year cycle.

Unfortunately, there was a brief there needed to be a brief delay for the sergeant exam this year due to other workload within the staffing services department. So we are going to put out it is our intention to put out a job posting for this at the second meeting in May and hopefully and it's our goal to have a new eligible list ready by November or December of this year. So the department is requesting that the current list be extended through December 5.

Okay. Because otherwise there won't be anyone that they can promote?

Yes. There would be a six month approximate six month gap.

Okay. Any questions or comments?

Madam Chair, I just have a brief comment. I do want to I am not against this. And I but I understand that we are considering other changes that would essentially expand the group of possible sergeants, via various methods. So I do just want to note, it seems like there are still a lot of eligible candidates remaining that haven't been promoted yet.

That's correct.

Yeah. There's a letter in the file that outlines the current status of the eligible list and how many are still on it, etcetera.

Yeah. I guess I'm just trying to look at the whole picture here.

Like is the idea that, just so I make sure I understand, is the idea of like maybe the changes to the candidate pool need to wait until after this list is exhausted or something?

Yes. I guess I'm not quite coming up. I'm coming up to and not quite saying that as a decision I just it is notable to me that there is still quite a large pool even before we make changes that would expand the pool.

Yeah. Let me say that about eligible lists. If they get too old, then the then you don't know what the people on that list have been doing in the meantime. And, you know, it's better to have currency with the list to some extent. At least that's my experience with it.

And you're saying that we cannot physically do another test

until June, July? Well, we'll do the well, realistically no.

Just with the workload that the staffing services unit has, something had to give a little bit and it was decided that this would be pushed back slightly.

Because we do

need the sergeants come summertime for supervision.

Yes. But there are plenty of names left on the eligible list. Commissioner Feng to your question, it is also the recommendation of the Milwaukee Police Supervisors Organization that the list be renewed every two years and they prefer to have new lists even if there is still a goodly number of names on a prior list. They feel it gives people more opportunities to apply and allows them to get the very best candidates for supervisors.

Sure. And I guess my comment wasn't necessarily against this particular item or the upcoming items.

Yeah. I understand. Okay. Any other questions or comments on this item? Item seven.

Is there a motion? Mr. Chair, move approval.

Second. Okay. I will take a voice vote on this item. All in favor please signify by saying aye.

Aye. Any

opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Director please proceed with the agenda.

Item eight, FPC 212,507 resolution relating to the approval of the fire cadet eligible list for the Milwaukee Fire Department. Okay. And this is for the class that will start in August.

Okay. Do any of the commissioners have any questions or comments regarding this item? The eligible list is the result of a testing process, Isn't that correct?

That's correct. Okay.

Hearing no questions, I will take a motion.

Move approval.

Second.

Okay, good. And I will take a voice vote on this item. All in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Director, please proceed with the agenda.

I will now read the items under new business starting with Item nine, FPC 212,508, resolution relating to common counsel file number 251,663 substitute motion modifying Milwaukee Police Department standard operating procedure four sixty, use of force. And just by way of background, this matter was heard at the last meeting as a communication file. It was my understanding that it should be brought back as a resolution file for this body to consider. And so the resolution before this body is to adopt or I'm sorry to recommend adoption or approval of the motion which is contained in the file which would modify SOP four sixty to require use of force reports when members draw or display a firearm to effect an arrest?

Yes. We did discuss this at some length and it's tracked out in the legislation details provided by Alderman Bergalis. Are there any questions or discussion that you wish to have on this topic now before we take a vote? Okay. Well then, I'll take a motion.

I move approval. Second.

Okay. This is a voice vote I think. Should we?

We've never done one of these before so I had it set up as a

Do it by roll

call. Yeah.

Yeah. That's right.

That's okay. Commissioner Burgos? Aye. Commissioner Evans? Aye. Commissioner Fung? Aye. Commissioner Spence?

Aye.

Commissioner Spencer? Aye. Commissioner World Patterson? Aye. And the chair votes aye. Motion carries. Please proceed with the agenda.

All right. We've done item 10. We'll move to item 11, FPC 212,510. Communication from FPC staff relating to the minimum requirements regarding discipline for the police sergeant position. I have submitted a memo with some recommendations related to as the file suggests the disciplinary requirements for the sergeant position.

It was it'll be it's my request that that matter be referred to the testing and recruiting committee which will meet on May 12, which is next week to discuss this as long along with the other recommended change to the minimum service requirement for the sergeant position.

Okay. And I

am happy to answer questions now.

Any questions?

I was just going to move to send this to committee.

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay. I will take a voice vote. All in favor please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries. Director, please proceed with the agenda.

Item 12, FPC 212,511, communication from the Milwaukee Police Department relating to recent changes to MPD standard operating procedures or standard operating instructions. There are five policy changes no, yes, five policy changes, which are SOP two sixty three records management, four sixty seven conducted energy weapon, five seventy I am sorry, four seventy five military deployment, reintegration, six seventy, bomb threats, suspicious packages, improvised explosive devices and then standard operating instruction for police chaplaincy.

Okay. I will say that these are changes to the SOPs but I don't think they are policy changes. They are kind of readjustments and amendments.

Fair enough.

Policy. Okay. Is there a department member still with us who can explain the changes? Yes.

Okay. This is chief of staff Heather Huff. I have left the room, but I am still attending. I can go over they're all really administrative. But for SOP two sixty three records management, it's an update on how the admin bureau will appoint quality control reps, removing a reference to the CAD system, not being operational portions of the policy since this will now be handled by DEC.

Updating references from technical communications to DEC for SOP four sixty seven conducted energy weapon. It's updating when the CEW, that's conducted energy weapon battery, should be charged or changed out, what materials can ignite when a CEW is utilized, and updating that the operator, not the supervisor, shall file a department memo explaining the circumstance of any damaged equipment because they're gonna know directly what happened to that equipment. For military deployments, SOP four seventy five, we updated the name of the Department of Veteran Affairs. We added the member's commanding officer or designee will provide the information about the deployed member at their work location on the military service banner. Added in the absence of a military service mentor, the member's commanding officer will find an acceptable partner for the returning member and removed a reference to a website in the reference section that no longer exists.

For SOP six seventy, bomb threat suspicious packages, we changed technical communications to DEC, updated the chart related to safe standoff distances so it aligns with the updated charts or guidebook from the US DOT. We we remove the requirement of the hazardous hazardous devices unit to be notified of the receipt of a bomb threat as they only need to be notified if a suspicious package or item is found and it's covered later in the policy. And remove the responsibilities of the DC since we cannot dictate policy for another agency. And finally, for the police chaplaincy SOI, we only updated that to add chaplains are not to interfere with civilian employees or any hospital staff in the performance of their duties and for chaplains to respect all operational, medical, and administrative protocols and avoid actions that could impede law enforcement activities, patient care, or hospital operations.

Okay. Any questions? Just one question,