Milwaukee police defends use of Flock cameras despite cases if misuse

MPD defending the flock camera system amid cases of misuse. Jason Calvi live in the newsroom with this evolving debate over the cameras that are watching you. Jason. Hey Ben. Hey Kim. Yeah. Three Milwaukee police officers have been investigated for misusing the flock system. Those are those cameras that snap photos of car license plates driving by the first MPD officer. You can see him here. Josue Ayala resigned and then was convicted of spying on a romantic partner and that partner's ex. Now we learned the second was fired. Prosecutors charged MPD detective Tehran J Chapman with felony and accused him of using flock to stalk to people. And we also learned MPD Internal Affairs is investigating a third officer for a policy violation but not for breaking the law. MPD says that officer is still on duty during the investigation but has lost access to the flock system. MPD says they've honed their audits to find possible bad actors and they say the system is indeed solving crimes in the city where the homicide clearance rates have improved. That's the rate of solving homicides. They've improved in recent years and this year that's at 87%. That automated life license technology in that instance led our officers and detectives to the exact location where our subject was. And then as I think a lot of people have seen the news, he was taken into custody safely despite the fact that he had two firearms in his possession at the time the officers were dealing with them. So that helper technology led directly to where his location was through some very talented and thorough investigation. So MPD talking about one of the cases there that they utilize the flock technology to actually apprehend someone who is accused of killing three different people. This week the Milwaukee Common Council demanded answers from MPD about flock safeguards. The council is giving MPD until september 30th to respond. They're still working on that. So MPD would not talk to me about the letter. I'll have much more on this issue about flock cameras. The cameras watching you and your car coming up Jason. This has really opened up a Pandora's box. It started off with these cases of isolated cases of misuse. But now we're looking at which agencies, how many agencies are able to gain access to that information, how long it's kept. I mean there are bigger issues here. Yeah. And MPD today told me that they only share their flock camera database with police departments agencies in the state of Wisconsin. They say they do not share it with federal agencies. That's been one of the questions that common council members have is is ice potentially tapping into Milwaukee's database to potentially use that database to arrest people for immigration deportation efforts. And the city of Milwaukee says they are not sharing this with any federal partners, only with police departments in the state of Wisconsin. They used to share the database with one outside force. That was the city of Chicago. But they tell me they have actually stopped sharing. So now they're only sharing with departments here in Wisconsin. Did MPD talk about the quote unquote administrative errors? There's a woman arrested on the interstate in Brookfield. That was an MPD case and there was oops, we forgot to delete that. We're actually not looking for that car anymore. And then this woman's driving it and there's a high all sorts of guns pointed at her at the interstate. Yeah, that was a case where the Brookfield police actually had their guns drawn. They pulled this person over and I'm gonna actually look at that case coming up at five. So MPD tells me that that car had actually been utilized. They believe in a homicide. It would have been cleared. It had gone through the tow lot. It had cleared. And so they say it was human error. They did not actually delete that entry from the flock system. So it pinged that this person was driving in the Brookfield jurisdiction and they pulled that car over. Little did they know that the person that they had their guns drawn was an innocent person was not involved with that homicide. Yeah. So yeah, there's been all sorts of stories with these flock cameras. So