Retired police chief talks accountability and Flock cameras

One retired police chief says there shouldn't be just two options, leaving the license plate readers without oversight or getting rid of them altogether. Tom Weitzel is joining us via Zoom tonight. Tom, thank you so much for taking the time. Hey, thank you for having me. So you wrote an entire position paper on this topic and one thing that really stood out to me, what I just said, is that you feel stuck between two bad options. Can you explain that? Yeah, I don't believe there should just be the option of dumping FLOC altogether or the police having unfettered access to it. And I think the public needs to understand, and even certain chiefs and sheriffs, there's two versions of FLOC. And FLOC is really the brand name for license plate readers, right? Motorola has a version called Vigilant. There's many license plate readers out there. So they need to have, it's been out there since 2018. And now all of a sudden, FLOC is being portrayed as keeping data beyond its agreed upon contract, which in many communities it has done, that that's true. But I don't think we should just have it no FLOC or FLOC. And so somebody, I was asked the other day in another interview, well, you're for FLOC, you're for these license plate camera, what do you want to do about it? So that's why I wrote this position paper as a former chief, like, here's what I would do if I was chief, here's how I would justify it, here what I would have my officers do, because it is a fantastic tool. But I can tell you, there is no police tool, no police tool that is 100% misuse proof. It does not exist. So Tom, talk to us about, I know it's four pages long, but if you could summarize the main points that you would do if you were still in law enforcement as the chief, what are those four points you would make? Yeah, I would have an open portal, which our communities already have, at least many do. I'd also get a portal that could be used to why you search. So example, somebody stopped your car, you could search, like, what's the cause? The officer would have to put in there, I ran your license plate because it was reported as a suspicious vehicle, or I ran this license plate because it ran a red light. You'd have to have a justification that's available to the public. I think there should be public oversight. There should be mandatory training. Here in Illinois, we have mandatory training for firearms, for mental health services, for de-escalation. The same training and funding should be for the operation of block cameras, because there's really two uses here. There's the passive use, which is used by the patrol division. And what I mean by that is the block camera will hit on a stolen car, a car wanted in carjacking, wanted in maybe a kidnapping, a child sexual abuse case. And the officers only respond to that to attempt to stop the car. You're seeing the misuse when it's used as an investigative tool. So there needs to be much more oversight on the investigative tool, not the passive use of the system. So how do you get the public to trust these license plate readers? And is it too late for that? I don't think it's too late. And you absolutely have to get their trust. And like you do any other police related issue, it has to be open and transparent. If it's not, the public won't support any police action. It has to be available, an oversight committee with citizens appointed to it. When I was chief, we had citizens committees for everything. Let's use that for these LPR systems. Let's have outside audits at least twice a year. I saw them proposing once a year in other communities. I would say twice a year, because if the police don't adapt to this, there's already national legislation being proposed to eliminate it completely. Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation nationwide to take away all federal funding from communities that use F.L.A.C. And he doesn't just mean police funding. That would mean roadway funding for your communities. It would mean other federal funding, not just funding that goes to police departments. So this has a wide, wide range of possibilities. Well, Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to join us and talking about this topic as it has really been a topic of conversation in many law enforcement agencies across our state. We appreciate your perspective tonight. Thank you. Thank you.