City Council - Special Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Before we begin tonight's special meeting, our deputy city clerk would like to make a brief statement regarding the public comment portion of our meeting.

MAYOR LORRAINE. THANK YOU AND WELCOME EVERYONE THANK YOU AND WELCOME EVERYONE TO THE CITY COUNCIL SPECIAL TO THE CITY COUNCIL SPECIAL MEETING THIS MONDAY, MEETING THIS MONDAY, OCTOBER 5TH. OCTOBER 5TH. DEPUTY CITY CLERK, CAN YOU DEPUTY CITY CLERK, CAN YOU PLEASE CALL THE ROLL?

Here. Thank you and welcome. We're excited to be here in person with options for those who choose not to be in person to still participate virtually. Thank you for your cooperation and for helping us maintain an efficient and accessible meeting environment. There are several ways to participate in public comment. For those attending in person, you may complete a yellow request to speak slip and hand it to the Deputy City Clerk. If you're participating remotely, use the raise your hand feature in Zoom and you'll be called on at the appropriate time. If you're calling in via phone, please press

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Thank you. I will close public comment and bring the item back to council for questions, comments. I see Council Member Diaz-Nash.

Thank you to the mayor, thank you to the police department for the presentation, for all the work you've done. Thank you for everyone who came to speak tonight. This is a topic that we're learning as much as we can about and we will continue to evolve. So I have a couple questions that I would love to ask as well. How have we responded to the grand jury findings? The chief mentioned the grand jury report. How have we responded to the findings?

RECOMMENDED SPECIFICALLY TO FLOCK BECAUSE THAT'S OUR CONTRACT WITH UPON RENEWAL TO TO INCORPORATE SOME LANGUAGE WHICH WE WOULD PLAN TO DO SHOULD WE WISH TO RENEW THAT CONTRACT DOWN THE ROAD OKAY THANK YOU VERY MUCH SECONDLY WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED FROM OTHER AGENCIES MISTAKES I HEARD I THINK LIEUTENANT CASAZA MENTIONED THAT MAYBE YOU CAN HELP US WITH SPECIFICS

Okay. Thank you very much. And in the audits, have you found anything that has led you to make changes?

Okay, thank you. I think that's very important, not just doing the audits, but identifying what we have to learn and making changes. And I know going forward, I would certainly appreciate getting periodic updates from the police as to what you're learning in the audits and, you know, what changes are made. And then just to be clear, is there any human being information that is captured either, you know, in the LPRs or, you know, with with Arctic in general and the drones?

Thank you. I think overall, I'm very impressed with what's been done. I'm as impressed with the changes and the tightening of what you're doing, the fewer departments, the fewer agencies, and really the focus on looking at the audits, both... anything within the arctic i i have also seen just the incredible benefit that the community has received from this technology and so i would be very interested in keeping a close eye on what it is going forward and having periodic reporting to the council but i think i've personally seen the benefit and very much want to support its continuance thank you

Thank you, and Deputy Mayor Fernandez, please go ahead.

Thank you for a very comprehensive presentation, and I am grateful for everything that San Mateo PD does for us. I just have two questions. Councilmember Diaz-Nash had covered a lot of the topics. No, it's perfect. The less I talk, the better. One question is with regard to the Axon contract, is there any cost savings there?

Thank you, Chief. And then the other question is, we've heard from some of the commenters today, like the cities of Halfon Bay and Mountain View both stop or cut off their contracts with FLOC. Are they pursuing, I guess the question is, are there alternatives that they are pursuing in absence of FLOC?

Are there are there any alternatives like half-moon Mountain Views not be Mountain View specifically that are not doing can't like LPR that in general are there alternatives.

Something that can replace that technology that is available to us and in our budget that exists.

Thank you. Council Member Strykow-Gorodzki.

Thank you. Councilmember Newsom. Thank you through the mayor. First off, thank you for a great presentation. Secondly, I'd like to thank all the community members for coming out and asking the tough questions. I think that an important part of this program is to make sure that we are doing the audits, we are keeping things tight, and our information is not getting out there. I guess one of my questions was... You mentioned there was over 280 agencies. Do we have any concerns that data may have been leaked or breached during that time when we had that many agencies?

THANK YOU. WHAT ABOUT AS FAR AS REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION? TO PIGGYBACK ON WHAT COUNCIL MEMBER WAS SAYING, IS THIS PRACTICE SIMILAR TO, I MEAN, IT'S SHORT OF A WARRANT BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT GOING IN FRONT OF A JUDGE, BUT WOULD YOU COMPARE IT TO A SIMILAR PROCESS TO THAT, MEANING YOU HAVE TO ADJUST CAUSE, YOU HAVE TO CHECK MULTIPLE BOXES, OR IS IT A LITTLE MORE FREE AVAILABILITY BASED ON YOUR DISCRETION?

and we do that i mean there's i mean we will stop sharing with you if i find out that you're sharing our information without our permission or you're not using it for what you said you're going to be using it for okay and then just from an internal perspective you know one of the things brought up was i want to troll my ex-girlfriend is there is there some internal um gates meaning can can a single person make a decision or is there a check and balance of such that You know, it can't be the person operating the camera and also deciding whether or not to do the search. So is there a check and b

No, I mean, well, like an actual license plate search, right? So I want to find out if this blue Mustang Mach-E has been driven through, you know, San Mateo in the last 24 hours. Can I, as an officer or a person working at Arctic, can I decide to do that search on my own? Or is there a check and balance where I have to go to a supervisor and

WHAT I'M HEARING IS WE HAVE GUARD RAILS IN PLACE. YES. CHECKS AND BALANCES. The last thing is more of a comment. I sit on the fire board for San Mateo Consolidated Fire. And literally almost every meeting, which is about every six weeks, I sit on the board. They constantly are telling me success stories about how great it is to have eyes on a scene sometimes three and four minutes before they get there it gives them a lot more leeway so i do want to make sure we emphasize that this is not just being used for crime and force enforcement it's being used for other public safety and it does serve

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Those are all my questions. Thank you.

I realize we are now dipping into extra time. So I will try to be brief. We have had a number of questions asked already. I'D LIKE TO ASK ABOUT THE RETENTION OF DATA FOR 30 DAYS WITH ALPRS AND COULD YOU SPEAK A LITTLE MORE, LIEUTENANT OR OTHERS, AS TO HOW WE ARRIVED AT THAT NUMBER, THAT AMOUNT OF DAYS, AS WELL AS TRADE-OFFS RELATED TO CONSIDERING POTENTIALLY LOWER DURATIONS.

THANK YOU. LET ME SEE. AND MAYBE JUST RELATED TO THAT, LIEUTENANT, IN YOUR PRESENTATION YOU TALKED, SHARED A BIT OF the audit assistance that Flock provides. And one of the flags that you showed as an example was searches beyond 30 days. And I guess I wonder if that might speak to, is that maybe like a network sort of search that involves people jurisdictions we are sharing with that might have policies of retention beyond thirty days or is that would that be possible under our current system as well

I see. So it's more checking on a subsequent day to see if any new data has involved that vehicle. Correct. I see. But if one were to do that for more than 30 times, that might be a flag in that perhaps there's activity there that doesn't seem to be bearing out and maybe is indicating something that It should at least be looked at in the audit process.

That's what it's designed for, yeah. Thank you. Okay. Can you say a little of who is assigned to conduct the audit reports? Is it all city-based, or is there an independent auditor as well? No, I'm the guy who does it. Okay. And are audit reports available to the public?

Thank you. I think that will suffice for the moment from me. I wanna echo my council members in thanking the department for bringing forth this information to the public tonight. And I wanna thank those also who came and gave their input on some aspects of this technology. This is an informational item tonight, so there is not necessarily any action occurring with this item. So I will be closing this item at this time and we'll be going to our regular meeting which has more to come. Thank you everybody and Deputy City Clerk, I'm guessing we'll be reconvening in about five minutes.

Okay, I've been told to shoot for 7.45 and so we'll reconvene it then. Thank you very much.