Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

🎵 🎵 Thank you. Bye. 🎵 🎵 Thank you. Bye.

Thank you. I will say to everybody in the room, if you're sensing a lot of nervous energy from me, it's my first time chairing a committee meeting. So apologies in advance for everything I get wrong. And to my colleagues, please correct me if I'm doing something illegal. With that, we will proceed directly to today's agenda. We have two items before us. Both relate to the topic of changing technology use in our public safety arena. We are delighted to have two speakers with us today. And to kick things off, I would like to invite Deputy Chief Kurt Hallstrom of the St. Paul Police Department to present on SVPD and public safety technology.

Item number one is SR26-132, St. Paul Police Department presentation about the use of technology and camera capabilities.

And I'm sorry, before you get started, I will just note for my colleagues, we'll have 30 minutes for each of our presentations. I will start the time right away and we'll take questions throughout rather than waiting until the end. So I will do my best to track as those come up.

Okay. Ready? Good afternoon, Chair, council members, and community members. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the St. Paul Police Department's use of public safety technology and, more importantly, the safeguards that govern its use. I want to begin by acknowledging that technology in policing raises legitimate questions. People have a right to ask them. Ask how these tools are used, who has access to them, how the information is protected, and what prevents its misuse. Those questions are not obstacles to this discussion. They are a reason for this discussion and why we're here today. Our message today is straightforward. Public safety technology is only legitimate when it operates within constitutional policing guidelines. Our answer is not trust the technology, and it's not trust us. Our answer is constitutional policing, lawful basis, limited scope, trained users, documented reasons, case numbers, and data retention, limits, audits, public reporting, and consequences for its misuse. The Saint Paul Police Department uses public safety technology to help protect life, investigate crime, improve situational awareness, and document events transparently. These tools include body cameras, CCTV, trailer cameras, unmanned aircraft system, also known as UAS, license plate recognition, and real-time information center. Every use remains subject to constitutional standards, state law, department policy. supervision, training, audits, and accountability. Technology does not supersede nor does it replace constitutional policing. Technology must operate inside constitutional policing. Throughout this presentation, you will hear a reoccurring theme, lawful purpose, limited use, trained operators, documented actions, audibility, public transparency, and corrective action when necessary. When we discuss drones and our Drone Program, it's important to understand what the program is and what it is not. It's designed to help trained pilots respond more quickly on a high priority call for service. A drone can often arrive in minutes and provide information that helps officers make safer, more informed decisions before arriving on scene. However, faster response does not mean lower standards. Minnesota law, federal aviation regulations, department policy, training requirements, flight logs, audit controls, and reporting requirements all remain in place. These drones are not deployed for general surveillance. Their use must be lawful, documented, and reviewable. You will also hear about license plate reader technology. SPPD LPR use is only for specific public safety. and investigative purposes such as locating missing persons, recovering stolen vehicles, supporting criminal investigations, and identifying wanted vehicles. SPPD LPR technology does not identify drivers. It does not use facial recognition. It is not used to issue speeding tickets or red light citations. Queers require trained and authorized users, a documented reason, and a case number. Access is logged, reviewed, and auditable. Again, our answer is not trust the technology. Our answer is constitutional policing, lawful purpose, documented use, audits, transparency, and accountability. A key component of that accountability is independent review, public reporting, audit requirements, data practices, controls, compliance reviews, retention requirements, and access controls are designed to ensure that these systems can be examined, verified, and evaluated. Trust should be supported by evidence, not assumptions. You will hear about a real-time information center, or RTIC is what we call it. RTIC officers provide real-time information situation awareness during active incidents. Their role is to improve officer and community safety, reduce uncertainty, and to provide actionable information during rapidly deploying events. RTIC operates under the same legal policy training, documentation, and audit requirements that govern technologies it uses. Finally, we will share examples where these tools have helped already to locate missing persons, interview in violent incidents, identify suspects in serious crimes, respond to public safety threats, and assist people in crisis. The common thread in each example is not a broad monitoring system. It is a specific public safety purpose, a documented deployment, and a defined legal basis for its use. Public safety and constitutional rights are not competing values. They must exist together. The standard we apply is simple. If a technology cannot be used lawfully, transparently, and accountably, we should not be using it. As we move through this presentation, we will welcome questions and scrutiny, as that is part of accountability. We have built time for questions and discussion during and at the end of our presentation, which covers all of the technologies and controls I have just briefly mentioned. Some of your questions may be answered in an upcoming section, and we will be more than willing to return at a later time if additional information is needed from us. Our commitment to you and the community of St. Paul is we will always be lawful, purposeful limited use trained operators documented actions audit public transparency and corrective action when necessary safety and constitutional rights go together senior commander murphy will guide you through the presentation and i will be here as support and make sure we're at the right point of our powerpoint so

Thank you, Council Members, Council Chair. Quick agenda. I'm going to give a purpose and overview for the technology that we're utilizing, go over some guardrails, constitutional protections, our accountability and our transparency that we have in place, talk about our dock drone program, which we recently initiated, license break recognition in the Arctic that Deputy Chief Halstrom referred to, and examples of usage and our community commitment. the third page of the slide shows a majority of the technology that we are using in the field today it's important to acknowledge as the chief said not only does this help with investigative investigations and improve such awareness every use is subject to those constitutional standards the law the policy the supervision the training and accountability That's the backbone to these systems, and that's how we're able to use this on a regular basis. We've got body-worn cameras, CCTVs that are out in public streets, our trailer cameras that are deployable to certain situations or sites, license plate recognition, and then the UAS systems, the use of the drones both that are docked on a building rooftop and the ones that we deploy in a patrol squad car. Some of these guardrails are in place. We've got the law on both sides for both LPR systems and the drone systems. Fourth Amendment, state statute, government data practices, and FAA titles when it comes to the drone pieces. There's also St. Paul police policy in both those arenas. And specifically when it comes to the drone or the UAS policy, I was here three years ago to present to council. We held several meetings with the community to seek community input as we drafted that policy and put that into place. There's also audit controls. All of the technology has the technology built in so we can see who accesses it, when they access it, the day they access it, what they're searching for. So all that information exists on the back end, and we're able to provide that both for a request for that data and internally to ensure that our folks are compliant with policy and the law. When it comes to the drones, there's an annual report that goes to the Commissioner of Public Safety. 2025 should be released in the near future here. And for the audit of the license plate recognition, the state statute requires a biannual third-party audit of our use of that. And there's a couple slides here that I can speak to to show the results of that. In addition, when you perform searches on these software platforms, it requires a case number so that we know it's part of an active investigation. It requires the reason or the criminal nature of that investigation as well. So it's tied to that search and part of that audit. This is that independent audit that was published on October 15th of 2025. Just to summarize, at the request of St. Paul Police Department, LOGIS conducted the biannual audit of the portable recording system presented to Minnesota State Statute. I'll skip through this. If you have that material in front of you, we're free to answer questions on it at any time. But the conclusion was that the St. Paul Police Department is in compliance with state law. It's in compliance with department policy when it comes to the license plate reader technology. A little bit more on the transparency side with the drones. We do not share that information outside of the police department. State law is specific that any recorded video is destroyed within seven days unless it's part of an active investigation. So our evidence system, Axon, automatically has those retentions built in and deletes that information. All these flights are logged. We've got another product that tracks the drone in the air It can show the direction, the height, the location via GPS. It can show the angle of the camera. what the camera is pointing to. So that is all part of that audit system on our drone program as well.

And Senior Commander, we have a question from Consul President Naker.

Thanks so much, Chair. I'm curious, two questions. One, our next presentation, which I'm really glad both of these presentations are happening in the same day, because I think we can sort of triangulate a little bit and have you talk to each other, but is about flock cameras. And I'm wondering, we've heard a lot about flock cameras in particular. Can you clarify, because I don't see it written here, where are flock cameras being used in the city of St. Paul, either drones or ALPR? And then in terms of videos not shared, unless there's an active investigation, what counts as an active investigation? Does that have to be a judicial warrant? Can it be an administrative warrant? For immigration purposes, for example, what would count as this is an active investigation, therefore we need your video?

If there's an open case, that would consist of an active investigation. So then that video is retained along the parameters of that case. So actually that data becomes public once that case is closed, and we hold on to it depending on the type of case and the retention values that are associated with that case.

So if another agency said, we have an active investigation, an open case, we need your video footage, you would share that video footage?

Potentially. The case ultimately comes down to that investigator and will that releasing that video harm that case. For public consumption, it's not public until that case is closed and no longer active. If there's an active law enforcement case with another jurisdiction, then that would potentially aid that case. It would be up to the investigator that's in charge of that case ultimately to release any evidence that's associated with it.

And then the question about FLAC cameras and where those are.

Yeah, we have a couple of slides on FLAC cameras. Or one slide, I should say. So FLAC is a brand or a vendor of LPR. Currently in the city of St. Paul, there's two FLAC cameras that are associated with the St. Paul Police Department. And then Ramsey County has a number of cameras within the county. Some of them are located in the city of St. Paul. When it comes to those LPR cameras that are fixed, at an intersection or a site. The state requires those to be registered on their website that gives that location. And then kind of the processes behind LPR is We do not share that data with anybody outside of the state of Minnesota. We do not share that data with any federal law enforcement agencies. That data is strictly shared with Minnesota agencies and our law enforcement partners. And in that sharing, we have access to their LPR data as well. Same lines of transparency queries are tracked. Everybody that does this has to have specific training related to the use of this technology, and we're able to audit that at any point in time as well. Every query is tracked. That's retained in our system for two years. The actual data that's accessible to us under state statute is only available for 60 days, then it has to be deleted. So that's how our in-car squad cameras work and retain that data when it comes specific to FLOC and our contract with them. that data is retained for 30 days and then it's destroyed or no longer accessible to us.

To more specifically answer a couple of your questions that you had asked, you asked if our drone has LPR technology. Our drones do not have LPR technology. In reference to the policies when it talks about when it's evidence and when it's not evidence. So our drones record when they go out, and then when they're on scene, and then when they return, And if that is deemed to be evidence, it becomes part of the evidence policies of the state and the St. Paul Police Department. So it becomes evidence of the case. We take it from the system which lives now, and we put it in our evidence manager. So then it's governed under the same types of policies as if I was at a crime scene and I took a crime scene photograph. And that was deemed to be evidence. It's now put into our evidence manager, evidence.com, and it's managed like a piece of evidence specifically to this case. What delineates the two is sometimes the devices and the drones and the LPRs are capturing things that are not deemed to be evidence. That is deleted and removed within seven days unless somebody says, this is evidence and it needs to be put into our evidence system. Does that help?

And one quick note for my colleagues, and I'll share this as a reminder at the end. Senior Commander Murphy referenced the two cameras, I believe, that the St. Paul Police Department utilizes in the city of St. Paul, the two flock cameras, but that there are additional Ramsey County cameras. We had invited the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office to be a part of this conversation today. They declined that invitation, but said that they would follow up via writing to any written questions that our council has. So we'll talk about follow-up questions for everybody, since I imagine there will be many of them. And that will include for the sheriff's office. And our office will be happy to share those questions in both directions. Please continue. And just, I guess I will quickly note, we are about halfway through your time.

Thank you. And one more note about the drones that are automated and leaving the rooftops. Those cameras are pointing to the horizon until they get unseen and they're taken over by an officer in the real-time information center. And then they're manually manipulated. So then that brings that camera down. So they're not looking at the ground when they're flying to their destinations.

And we have a question from Council Member Kim. Yeah, on the last slide, two quick questions. One is, are we sharing the LPR data with the Minnesota Fusion Center?

I believe the BCA has access to that data. Not 100%, I can follow up with you, but I'm pretty sure that the BCA has access.

Okay, and then a question about what does no internal affairs reports mean under the unmanned aircraft system or drone?

So in the three years that we've had that system in place and utilizing that technology, there has not been a single internal affairs complaint regarding a drone operator to date.

Follow-up question, if I may, Chair. What if during an active... Incident you are using a drone and you see Behavior of police officers that violate our city policies with that data then potentially be used for correction or How might use that data recognizing that you wouldn't necessarily be using it for an investigation but would be Also in turn review the footage for even our own police conduct.

Absolutely. We have a policy for stopping and investigating police misconduct. So that video footage would then transfer to that investigation and we would hold on to that because now there would be a separate active investigation related to it. So we've expanded our drone program to include these docked drones on the rooftop of three locations in the city, one in each district. Just a general overview. They have about a two-mile radius of coverage. Their batteries are anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes, which includes deploying to the scene and on the scene and then coming back. If you think about a call for service on a squad car having to traverse the city, you've got intersection stop signs, stop lights, congestion, things of that nature, so an average response time. would be somewhere in the nature of seven to 10 minutes. Obviously that response time is less for higher priority calls where we're going lights and sirens, but for a majority of the calls, that's not the case. So a seven to 10 minute response time. These drones can be unseen in two to three minutes and oftentimes in 60 to 90 seconds. Very helpful in that police response time and getting an initial eye on scene as to what the caller is seeing. That is called 911. We do not use these for general surveillance. As I said, when they're flying to the scene, the camera is pointing to the horizon, not looking at the ground. And again, we have to deploy these drones under the requirements of the state statute and our policy. So state statute says there's 11 exceptions where you can deploy a drone without a warrant and we follow that to a tee when we are deploying these drones into the field.

And we have one question from Council Member Kim. Thank you, Chair. A question around the response time. So when we get data from your department regarding like when a 911 call comes in and when a police officer or first responder even, right, is on the scene, that time is clocked and it's data that we like to share publicly because I think our response times are great. how much of this response time by drone is disaggregated from your response times overall? Is it included in your daily averages, or is it disaggregated in some way? Because I imagine the more that we use this technology, the shorter the response times for police will be, and I'm wondering how we disaggregate that data to determine the difference between a human responding versus a drone responding.

And because this is new, we're three weeks in, the systems track that data. We haven't published it to date, but I can tell you as of this morning when I looked, We're just under 500 flights since May 30th. And of those 500 flights, the drone has arrived on scene before a squad 51% of the time. So that's one of the factors, that's one of the statistics that we track in the system tracks. So we know to date that these drones have been on scene 51% of the times before squads. And they're not going to every call. Three is the number that we started at. So we have to be sensitive to what calls we send them to. We want to prioritize officer safety, those in-progress calls, and getting to the community in time. But we also got to be cognizant that we need to have some reserve in line for when that higher priority call comes. So they're not going to every call, but the calls that they do go to, they're on scene 51% of the time prior to a squad call.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I think the opportunity then to start tracking that data would be really lovely to see. So I'll, I think, request a follow-up to just make sure there's mechanisms in place for us to distinguish our police response time because that's deeply connected to our staffing levels and how many people are on at any given time and then the types of calls that this is being deployed. So I think it's just an opportunity. We'd be really interested. Commissioner Hallstrom, it looks like you were.

I was just going to point out that we don't classify the drone, the DDP program, as a full response to an active event that's occurring in our community. It's not intended to replace officers on the street driving a squad car. It's intended to get information that can be useful and helpful to deploy resources and direct resources response to events that are unfolding in our communities. So we will always send an officer to the calls for service. So I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you.

I have a question from the Council of the Coast. Thanks, Chair Coleman. I'll make this quick. Did you say 500 flights since May 30th? Correct. And then I'm just curious, how many police calls, so that would be almost for the whole month of June, how many calls per month have you had this month? Or what's a typical estimate of the calls you get per month?

I think our annual calls is around 250,000, would be a guess. So somewhere in 24,000 a month, 20,000 a month, somewhere around there. Thanks. So here's the LPR slide. Again, there's different manufacturers, different vendors. The one at the bottom of the page is what we have in our squad cars. They're used primarily for the recovery or identification of stolen vehicles, locating missing persons, supporting criminal investigations, and identifying wanted vehicles. So somebody, some form of law enforcement has to enter this plate into the system as it's part of an active investigation, and then that would provide an officer an alert if they come across that plate or if that plate scans. Squad cars are the same platform behind it or same technology. We don't use these for red light tickets. We don't use them for speeding tickets. And their primary use is for investigators and or officers to do that search function on the back end, which again requires a case number and requires a law enforcement specific reason as to why they're performing a search on a given plate. There's an example on this next page. This is kind of the response and the search mechanism that we use on the platform side. At the top, it shows offense type, case number, reason for the search. In that lower left corner, it shows what we get in return. It shows the date, the time, the location of that fixed camera, and then a picture of the vehicle. It's an overall picture of the vehicle, doesn't show any distinguishing factors of who's inside. It's just an overall picture of the vehicle and then the system zooms in on that license plate and gives you a bigger picture of the license plate so you can ensure that the plate that you're looking for is the same plate that pulls up in the system. And again, so this information that's returned is one piece of the equation, one tool for us. We still have to use other law enforcement resources to corroborate that this plate or this vehicle is in fact what we're looking for and part of that investigation. It doesn't single-handedly determine guilt or that we need to press this case forward to a prosecutor or that this is our target. It's one piece. of that puzzle and we corroborate that with other information. This is a screenshot of the BCA's website which houses all of the registered fixed position LPRs in the state. This is just the location of what's included in the City of St. Paul. So it shows our two fixed LPRs at Kellogg and Smith, and then it shows the number of Ramsey County license plate recognition readers that they have throughout the county. We do not coordinate the placement of Ramsey counties. That's their entity, they do that for their law enforcement purposes, and there's no coordination between the two agencies for that piece. Who has access to this data? I covered that earlier. I think 60 days by state statute. We keep the flock for 30 days. We do not share with anybody outside of the state of Minnesota. I checked that. There's no entities that have access outside of the state of Minnesota to our LPR data. Again, misuse is subject to review, corrective action, and discipline. Real quick, on a real-time information center, we started this on May 30th as well. We've got a number of trained officers and analysts that staff this center, and the goal is to provide that real-time information to officers responding in the street to give them more direct information better information so that they can make decisions based on what we're seeing in the crime center versus what the public caller is calling in a 911. We're trying to give them the best information so that they can approach a situation tactically and safely and keep the public safe as well. One example of LPR use, so in September of 2025, was a resident in lower town that was executed while painting on the sidewalk officers in a number of minutes received a vehicle description one of our arctic sergeants was working with ccdb at the time was able to identify that vehicle found a license plate We worked with our partners across the river in both Minneapolis and Hennepin County to see if that plate had been used across their borders. It did, in fact, go to Minneapolis. They relayed that there was a hit on that plate down in Belle Plaine. The vehicle and some suspect information corroborated Belle Plaine, and we deployed our officers there and were able to locate that suspect. So that's one instance of LPR use.

Thank you. And we have a question from Council Member Kim. Thank you. I just have a question around agreements with the BCA and other agencies. Do we have agreements in place that they won't share data that we've provided to other agencies like the federal government?

That's covered by state statute. So access to that information is for the use of that individual and that agency. And there are no sharing parameters allowed under state statute.

And while I do want to get to the final slides, I'm also noting that we have under two minutes for this presentation. So if my colleagues have any other questions to ask here, I want to invite them to do so.

So there's a few other examples. March of this year, there was an Old Kings rally at the Capitol. The night before, there was a threat of a potential active shooter through the use of the St. Paul Criminal Intelligence Unit and the Minnesota Fusion Center. We were able to track down that a vehicle and a suspect and that vehicle license plate registered in the state of Florida, which provided some relief. However, we needed to corroborate that that individual was with that vehicle and law enforcement in Florida was able to do that in a timely manner. So in about a 10 hour period, we went from having an active threat for an event that was going to house potentially 100,000 plus people to be able to put that to rest through our law enforcement partners and databases, and one of the things that led to that was the use of LPR. As far as the drones go in the Arctic, we've had two calls of folks that are in crisis and suicidal, and in two of those incidents, those folks left the location from where the call was placed and the drone was able to find them before squads arrived on scene. We brought the officers in, and they were eventually brought to the hospital for treatment and support. I'll just conclude here, because I think time's running out, but you have the packet in front of you for those other instances. But again, we just want to reiterate that these are used for lawful constitutional purposes. We have those guardrails in place, both statute, policy, and our internal auditing systems. Thank you for the time, and if you have any questions, we'll be around.

Thank you both very much. We appreciate you being here today and taking the time to share this information and answer our questions. I imagine we will have follow-up, and we will provide those to you in the coming days. I believe we will read number two into the record.

Item number two is SR26-133, ACLU Minnesota presentation about municipal regulations and automated license plate readers.

Excellent. I'd like to invite Mr. John Baylor, policy director of the ACLU of Minnesota, to join us for this item. We'll hand it over to you. And just noting, we will have 25 minutes for this presentation.

Thank you. Let's start something here and see if this works. Great. So I do appreciate the presentation from St. Paul PD. That did answer a decent amount of questions and a lot of what we were going to cover in the presentation. It is governed by state statute. That's 13.824. It does require disclosure of these cameras, these ALPRs, to the DCA within 10 days. St. Paul has that one location with the two cameras listed. And then those also by Ramsey County, which are, of course, governed by and put on county roads by Ramsey County. Yeah, in part of that statute, these can only be used based on reasonable suspicion when the data are pertinent to an active criminal investigation. So that's a key word. In that, for their criminal investigation, they can't be used for things like civil immigration purposes, traffic control, urban planning, other things like that. In both 13.824 and Chapter 13 generally, which governs data practices, sharing between law enforcement agencies requires the other agency follow the exact same data restrictions under this act. So that's access, classification, security, destruction. And the good news with SPPD only sharing with in-state agencies is that those in-state agencies should have a good awareness of Chapter 13 and those parameters. It's not perfect, but that way you're not explaining to out-of-state agencies exactly what they have to do with the data. So we talk a little bit about how Flock works. Flock is a data company. They're a data company that works in the police space, but what they primarily work with is data. And the appeal for Flock is the breadth of the network. There are over 100,000 public use Flock cameras working around the country through various law enforcement agencies. There is no accurate reporting that we have, either in state or out of state, on the private usage. They are in private use. A lot of big box retailers use them. A lot of repossession companies use them. They are mobile and so they can be used to find vehicles, to track shoplifters, to use them in any way that those private companies want to. There's no state regulation governing their usage in the private space. Importantly, each client can use the back end of these systems to manage their system to control access from other law enforcement agencies. That's how SPPD is able to prohibit out-of-state actors from accessing our cameras here. And that back-end management matters a lot. We did about 40-ish, a little more, data requests related to metro surge and related to flock usage around the state to various local agencies. And so some agencies do a much more restrictive. They do either just regional partners or nearby towns plus the state. And they'll get down to, you know, Roseville and St. Louis Park get down to between 100 and 200 a month. Some of those that don't do any back end management, for at least these, about 300,000 searches run on their cameras a month. So you can dramatically reduce the privacy invasions by doing that active back end management. St. Paul, for the month that we have in January, had about 5,000 searches run on their cameras. And that includes St. Paul doing searches on their own cameras, and other in-state law enforcement agencies. So it's on the lower end, but there are areas that it could be reduced. One of those areas that St. Louis Park recently put into place is to prohibit agencies with 287 agreements from accessing their cameras. The 287 agreement is a federal cooperation agreement for immigration purposes. And there are about 10 to 12 active agencies in Minnesota that have these agreements.

We have a question from Councilmember Kim. Can you name where those contracts are? I know in northern Minnesota, in the counties, and I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but I'm just really, like, I guess the real question I'm asking, I know there are some that are in greater Minnesota, Crow Wing County, there's some, I'm not going to regurgitate them. Where in the cities, is there any in St. Paul besides the St. Paul police, where... Where are those?

The 207 agreements? Yeah. There are a few different models. So Sherbourne County and one of theirs only have a jail enforcement model, which means they'll house immigrant detainees. And then there are a few that have either a task force model or a warrant service model. And that's where they're actively looking for immigrants being sought by DHS and ICE. The main ones that I can think of are Mille Lacs and Crow Wing and Itasca. And there are a few others in that space. But that's the realm of it for Minnesota. And there are a few small, I think, international falls and then a small town of like 800 up in Mille Lacs County also has that agreement as well. And so what FLOC has is they maintain they don't have a contract with DHS, they don't have a contract with ICE or CBP or any of the other federal agencies. But they don't really need to at this point. There are over 2,000 agencies around the country who are participating in this 287 program. It's both required in Florida and in Texas. So every single law enforcement agency in those states are participating in the 287 program. Some of them have contracts with LOC. And some of them can run searches. Again, because St. Paul PD does not allow out-of-state searches, they can't necessarily do that. But we do have those in-state agencies.

Thanks, Madam Chair.

So I just want to make sure I understand. So the concern would be that because St. Paul doesn't allow our data to be shared outside of the state, but if it were shared with an in-state agency that had a 287G agreement, then sort of by game of telephone, the data could be shared with DHS?

Yes. And... I guess I can move ahead a little bit. There are some instances, none of these are in St. Paul, and none of these are really necessarily in Minnesota, but there are instances of the abuse of these cameras at the bottom of this slide that I've talked about. So what we know from these data investigations is that in-state and out-of-state agencies use flock cameras to do immigration enforcement during metro search. And that includes searches in St. Paul. So what we have on this, and we're in discussions with St. Paul PD on the exact reasoning behind some of these searches and what comes out in the data request. So I mentioned the 40 or so data requests of these network audits that were discussed in the earlier presentation. That'll give you the information on what agency is doing the search, what individual within the agency is doing the search, the date, time. Flock assigns a unique search identifier for each search that's run. It is a stated reason. That used to be kind of an entry-level text box that an officer would have to type it in. Now it's more of a drop-down menu, as I understand, although there is an indication that individuals can and choose to type in a reason, which is how we know that these were run. There's also the license plate that was being searched for. There may be some other data that I'm missing there. Some of that is private data on individuals or investigative data, like the license plate itself. The reason for the search, St. Paul, as of yet, is the only agency that has redacted that from those audit logs. So we're in discussions about their interpretation of investigative data in that space. We're not looking for the actual pictures. We're looking for the stated reasons that those searches were run. But with that unique identifier and comparing with other cities, so when we get back those logs from Fridley, we can see that Mille Lacs ran a search for a civil immigration enforcement in Fridley. corresponding with that unique identifier. That unique search identifier also appears in the St. Paul audit log. So even though the reason is redacted, we know that of Fridley's search of these, or sorry, Mille Lacs' search of these 70 to a couple hundred cameras included both Fridley and St. Paul for that stated purpose.

Thank you. And we have questions from, as long as there's no follow ups from the president, then we have questions from Council Member Johnson and Council Member Kim.

OK. Thank you. And I just want to make sure that I believe I pretty much got it towards the last parts of it before raising my hand. But I just wanted to double check. So of the 40 plus agencies that have requested, The city of St. Paul. Well, the St. Paul Police Department is the only report that you received that had redacted information for the reason for the search. Is that correct?

Correct.

And then just for awareness as well of the 40-plus requested agencies, what are some of the reasons and the rationales? I guess, what were some of the things that were seen as sufficient reasons? Or just kind of like, what is the length of the idea that you're talking about?

Right. The data usually states a requisite sufficient purpose under state law. So it'll be something like a stolen vehicle. These cameras are helpful in use like Amber Alerts, Silver Alerts, again, stolen vehicles. Or in that sort of a hot list situation where you know a crime's been committed, you know somebody's fleeing with a certain license plate. There are, in other cities, not in St. Paul, we've seen use for traffic studies. We've seen other violations of state law where they'll state an improper purpose. And again, I believe from their representations, SBPD is in contact with the state office of, what's it called? There's a state office that does provide data practices advice. Data Practices Office might just be the name of it. And so those discussions are ongoing about that. And there are some agencies like the 287 agencies that have refused to turn over any data. So I guess I shouldn't say that they're the only one of the 40 that has, but of the agencies that have turned over the data, that's the only time we've seen that column redacted.

Okay, thank you. That's a helpful distinction, I think, from that point, just because that does make a slight difference.

Yes, I certainly don't want to imply that SPBD is the worst actor in this space. They have been responsive, and we think we'll get to a productive conclusion there.

Okay, yeah, no, I think that's just helpful. I think that's an important distinction to make there. still something that is worth the follow-up for it, but it's a slightly different picture if it was the only agency doing it versus maybe there being data that's waiting. So I appreciate that distinction. Thank you.

Council Member Kipp. Thank you, Chair. I have a question specific to the types of 287 contracts. So there's three different categories of contracts. But I hear it referenced as sort of like an umbrella. So my question is sort of specific because there's so many counties. There's four counties that have the task force model. There's four counties that have a warrant service model. And obviously, the jail enforcement is different in terms of why they might even want to access this data, if they're not in pursuit of someone on a warrant, or maybe they are doing the task force model and they cross into another county. Who knows? So my question is, we're hearing it spoken about in an umbrella sense. Is it true that you would have to have a specific type of contract in order to even have a motivating reason to pull some of this data? My question then is, is it true to say you would have to have a task force model contract or a warrant service model contract to have any sort of reasonable position to want to pull flock data?

That's probably true. I don't recall ever seeing, say, Sherbourne is the one that I know that only has the jail enforcement model or the jail services. I'm not clear on the exact title of this. It's not at the top of my head. I don't recall seeing Sherbourne in those searches as opposed to some of the task force models. But what I should clarify, too, is that those 287 agreements, regardless of type, do not provide, they don't overwrite state privacy law in this place. because you have a 287 agreement does not mean you are not also in violation of 13.824.

Okay, that is fantastic. So when we talk about an umbrella sense, it is It is meant to bundle them because by virtue of that contract, it doesn't give them the authority to access that data. OK.

Correct. And from these searches, it's unclear if there were, it's clear that searches were run. It's unclear if data was produced. And so there's a little bit of nuance in if that car never drove past the Fridley camera or drove past the St. Paul camera, there would be no responsive data to produce, which is likely but not necessarily the data practices violation. So that, because we have not collected the underlying data, we don't know if any data was produced on that. But those searches themselves by the searching entity are likely violations of the state statute.

And a question from Consul President Aker.

Thanks, Chair. This is actually more a question for SPPD, but it's being prompted by what you're talking about. So it can also be a follow-up if it's awkward to come back up. But I'm just curious, with our two cameras that are on Kellogg at Smith, looking north, how much does that How much do those see? If a car drives just past Kellogg and Smith, then those cameras pick it up? Or they can be directed and they can see everybody going by on the highway? I'm just trying to understand the magnitude of those two cameras' power.

Yeah, please, Senior Coiner Murphy.

So the cameras can only see one direction. So if that camera's pointing northbound, it's going to pick up those two northbound lanes. either moving away from it or moving towards it. It's not going to see all four intersections or lanes that are going north. They're only specific to the two or three lanes that are going north. They've got a somewhat narrow view of when they can capture those license plates. So if there's two at the intersection facing northbound, one of them's grabbing southbound traffic two lanes, one of them's grabbing the northbound traffic two lanes.

And super quickly, Madam Chair, would a search be... unbound in terms of time, like at any point in the last week? I mean, did they set the time parameters? Did a car pass this? Or is it, how is the search being done if those cameras are constantly on looking in those directions?

The cameras are constantly capturing every vehicle that goes by. The search parameters on the back end, you can search for a one-hour period, a three-hour period. You could search for two to three days, up to 60 days. So the person that's performing the search narrows those parameters based on the time and reference of what they're looking for.

Up to 60 days, because that's the retention.

Correct. OK. Sorry, 30 days for FLOC.

And sorry, just to make sure everybody heard that, you said it was 30 days for FLOC specifically, not 60. Got it. Thank you very much. Mr. Bailey, please continue.

Yes. And so we can move into those, like what other cities have done, what could be done in St. Paul if we're looking for more data. So FLOC does provide what I call transparency portals. And that'll allow... That's a public-facing portal. Most of the other police departments, Roseville, St. Louis Park, they link those on their website. I don't know what the cost is. It is compliant with the Minnesota Data Practice Act because it doesn't provide any personal data. It doesn't provide those reasons, the license plates. But it does give you a sense of how many cameras are captured or how many license plates are captured on a rolling 30-day period, how many searches were run against those cameras in the 30-day period, who the data is shared with, any hot lists the site uses. I believe the PowerPoint has been circulated. Those links will take you to St. Louis Park and Roseville's flock transparency portals. And to give a sense, just using those transparency portals, since I've been speaking, about 8 million cameras have been captured around the country. And so that's just entities that are using those transparency portals that this open source website is kind of aggregating together. Most cities and most entities in Minnesota don't use those transparency portals. So St. Paul could be ahead of the game there in providing that to the public, providing that transparency. I don't think they're perfect, but it does give this public a sense of exactly who is accessing the data, when. And it allows a little bit more public interaction with the system. But that gives you a sense of how popular and how many cars drive past those drive past those cameras at any given time. There's also a website link there that we would encourage the public to use. It tells you when you've driven past the flock cameras, how often. I'm not sure if it does provide the search results that have been done. This is how most of the misuse of these cameras has been uncovered from individuals who realized that their searches had been run on them and were not aware of or were not actually under an active investigation.

So I could interrupt just briefly there. I just want to note, I'm sure everybody's been following this, but there's been a significant amount of reporting lately about people who have used, as was just described, These data trackers realized that they were being stalked by former partners, people who had access to this data who were using it extremely appropriately to potentially engage in acts of domestic violence and stalking. So I wanted to make sure folks are tracking that because I think it's a very serious concern. It gets back to sort of what we talked about about what are the reasons for these searches being run and what are the legitimate purposes for them and why it's so important to understand what those reasons are in addition to the civil immigration enforcement and everything else.

Thanks, Madam Chair, and thanks for that important context. You mentioned that very few cities have these transparency portals. What is the downside or what is the cost to having that? It seems like a no-brainer.

I'm sure that the reasoning varies from city to city. I don't know the actual cost. I don't know what the choice is. I actually don't know how much Flock advertises them to each agency. When we've approached agencies about their searches, and we haven't spoken with St. Paul about this, so I'm talking about other Minnesota law enforcement agencies, some are fully aware of how open their backend searches are. Some are not. And some will respond to that new awareness by restricting who has access, and others simply just have not moved off of their pre-existing position. So I don't, again, I don't have a cost estimate. I don't know where it fits into the budget. I hope that answers the question. It doesn't, but that's okay. So some of the recommendations there, in addition to the transparency report, restricting out-of-state access, as you already do, is a great start. Restricting access from agencies participating in that 287 program. Updating the audit. The state requires that biannual third-party audit that was discussed, and those are incredibly helpful, and they're incredibly detailed. and we're not suggesting doing more of those third-party audits, but St. Paul's in a good position of already having a civilian oversight process of just running these audits, which are, it's just a printout, it's just running a report from a system you utilize, and discussing those on a more frequent basis. That internal oversight, both within the city and then within SPPD, is important. I know they mentioned they do that already, and that's kind of where you're going to see the agency itself can look at those audits. They can see whether their officers are using the program too much, whether they're not necessarily filling out the forms the way they should. And that's kind of that transparency that wouldn't be available to the public under either the investigative data or private data on individuals. That's just not going to be available to either the general public or for site entities themselves. The Drones First Responder Program, we were unfamiliar with St. Paul's program, so we put together some general questions. I know as Minneapolis is considering this, and St. Paul's relatively new in it, it's good to hear that so many of the questions that we had raised have already been considered. The number of sites, the radius, the dock time, the response time, the non-use of the cameras until you were at the scene are all very important. There are always questions about the capabilities of the drone, whether or not they're capable of facial recognition technology is different than whether they're being used for facial recognition technology. What their load limit is, what they can be used for, can they carry something like a Stingray, which is a collection device for either GPS, it mimics a cell phone tower, essentially. San Francisco recently, I believe yesterday, first used their drone to disarm a suspect to attach a magnet to it, like what sort of interdiction efforts these drones are going to be used for in the future, or if not, it sounds like they're mostly being used to provide data so that the officers responding can better respond to the scene at hand, and that's generally how We think they should be used. General surveillance, interacting with suspects, that's best done by trained officers, by peace officers who are sworn by the state and are governed by state standards rather than, and by somebody on the scene who can see things that aren't necessarily apparent on the camera. And then there's always vendor questions. Axon is a little bit less of a public enemy than Flock, but they are still a data entity in the space. So what their data security standards are, how complaints are filed, public access and oversight. And then on the city end, ongoing public engagement with the residents to make sure that we're not over-policing and over-surveilling neighborhoods in the city. which is generally and historically around the country been done in minority neighborhoods. I want to make sure we're not contributing to that with just, you know, through technology instead of through general policing. But I do appreciate everyone's time. I think I have a few minutes left for questions.

Council Member Just. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Bailey. I have a couple of questions. One is just I want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So... So basically, when the status collected by FLOC, it can be shared by agencies if they choose to share it. And so I'm reading, for example, SPPD's presentation, LPR data is not shared outside of Minnesota. Queries require training authorization, case number and reason. but then there's also 10 agencies in Minnesota that participate in the 287 program. So even if we were to receive those requirements from that request, the training authorization case number and reason, once we give that data to them, then I guess who owns that data? They don't necessarily, they might have their own policy around how they share it, but could they do whatever they want with it at that point?

And so that's the recommendation to not share out-of-state stems from that because it's hard to bind out-of-state agencies to our Data Practices Act. They're required to. That's how our state law functions is what we like to say is those privacy protections follow the data. But to make other agencies and out-of-state agencies aware of those restrictions and have them acknowledge it is difficult. In-state, all of those agencies should be aware of the requirements of Chapter 13 and are required to abide by them. What those agencies do with the data after they receive it from SPPD is they're obligated under state law to follow those state practices, but there is nothing practically preventing them from sharing that data with other actors.

And then I guess if I could ask, who owns the data? If it's being shared and there's access to it with permission, but that varies, who actually owns this information?

The FLOC contracts we've reviewed indicate that St. Paul PD owns the data and that FLOC will not be selling the data. But FLOC does use the data for training purposes. They can use it for limited marketing purposes. They can use it anonymized for a variety of other purposes in the contract. But the data is St. Paul PD's.

And then I just have a quick comment for my colleagues. I know the county wasn't here, but they have quite a few more cameras, as you can see, all throughout our city. And so I'd certainly be, you know, I'll probably ask those questions to them and be curious as to the same feedback that SBPD gave us on how they operate. I would appreciate that from them.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Mr. Braylor. I'm sorry we're out of time for questions. A really quick one from Council Member Johnson.

It's actually not for ACLU. It's actually a comment for Commander Hallstrom and our senior commander, too. I guess it's more so just knowing, and it would be beneficial to, because we didn't get a chance to hear from the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office today, the level of communication that exists between SPPD and the Sheriff's Office when it comes to this topic. I think it would be really helpful to know just what all our officers know, like what all the department has access to when it comes to that, if there's any collaboration at all with the... with the 11, I think, cameras that they placed there. So just curious as to what information you all are able to get since they have opted to follow up and written response. I'm just interested in seeing what SPPD and the Sheriff's Office has, what level of collaboration there is, if any, and what we see here just from, you don't have to answer that right now. You can do a follow up from the department. But it would be helpful to know since I have a lot of questions, but I think it's more so just my general thought is what kind of requests could we potentially make to our board, our county board, as well. If they're not able to get to the council, I'm sure that the county commissioners may be interested. So that would be my suggestion for the chair and vice chair is maybe they would respond differently to their body of government. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Baylor, Deputy Chief, Senior Commander. We appreciate everybody's time today. I expect we will have follow-up questions for both the St. Paul Police Department, the ACLU, and then certainly there will be written questions for the Sheriff's Office. So we'll follow up with a timeline for getting all those together. We'll also share out, make sure everybody has the presentations from today so you can access the links from the ACLU. And we'll distribute the ACLU paper on drones and prospective or potential limits and recommended limits for their use. Thank you so much. We are adjourned.