Huntsville police double down on withholding Flock logs

The latest: At a three-hour public forum Wednesday night hosted by District 5 Council member John Meredith, a steady stream of residents questioned police officials' use of ALPRs.

• Comments and questions focused on how Huntsville shares access and protects data, and residents pushed the city to release audit logs and abandon the technology altogether.
• Huntsville police, represented at the meeting by chief Kirk Giles, North Alabama Multi Agency Crime Center director Curt Worshek and public information officer Sgt. Chris Jackson, said the technology plays a pivotal role in helping reduce Huntsville's crime rate.

Zoom in: Flock audit logs, records that show when and why an officer used the system and which license plates were searched, were the main topic, especially amid an uptick in cases of officers accused of abusing the technology around the country, including this month in Decatur.

• Huntsville police say an officer must have a legitimate law enforcement reason to access the data, and Giles said the data contains sensitive data pertinent to investigations and hence can't be released to the public.
• Residents pressed for the logs to be released, asking how the lack of abuse could be verified if logs aren't made public.

What they're saying: "If you guys are, as you say, using it properly (the audit logs) will exonerate you," said Caden Helbling, whose records request for the logs was denied by the city after being told it would cost him $1 million.

• "What you asked for in full was about 1.7 million pages' worth of data," city administrator John Hamilton told him Wednesday. "And every one of those pages … is law enforcement-sensitive and therefore by law not releasable to you."

Yes, but: Other agencies in Alabama have released logs, including Blount County, which did not respond to a request for comment from Axios Thursday.

• Asked by Helbling whether the city feels that those agencies are in violation of the law, Hamilton said "if they released the same thing that you asked of us, then, yes, it'd be our position that they broke the law."

By the numbers: Huntsville police gets about 450 calls for service every 24 hours, about 60-70 of which result in an ALPR search, and of those, six or seven produce a "result," Giles said.

• Huntsville currently has 29 Flock cameras, but more than 200 ALPRs. Only about 7% of HPD employees have access to the system, Giles said.

• Huntsville police pointed to declining crime rates as proof that its adoption of technology like ALPRs is paying dividends, citing specific cases such as apprehending a double homicide suspect from Tuscaloosa and recovering nearly 30 stolen cars so far.

Driving the news: Much of the conversation Wednesday centered on whether residents are being tracked by ALPRs.

• Huntsville police said no, stating that the cameras simply take a photo of a vehicle at one place at one time, providing a lead, but that after the photo, they don't know where the car goes.
• Many speakers, though, argued that a photo taken at one intersection and then another shows a trackable route of travel, and they shared worries of artificial intelligence taking the data much further.

Zoom out: On data security, Huntsville police said they control access to the data, which is granted to other law enforcement agencies on request, and stored on an Amazon Web Services cloud.

What we're watching: Helbling also asked Meredith for the City Council to pull the city's Flock contract — which expires in January — and its budget line item for votes and public comment when they come up for reapproval.

• "All I can do is raise it," Meredith said. "I will certainly ask to do that, but it's up to my colleagues."