Police defend Flock cameras as Utah lawmakers mull more regulations

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Utah police defend Flock cameras for helping solve crimes as lawmakers consider regulations.
Public scrutiny on cameras has increased in recent months.
Lawmakers question data use by private companies and discuss potential guardrails.

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah law enforcement officers urged state lawmakers to "let us have this tool" of automatic license plate reader cameras to continue conducting investigations and solving crimes.

But during a hearing Wednesday morning, some members of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee expressed skepticism about the cameras and whether the data they capture is being misused.

Automatic license plate reader cameras, often called Flock cameras, capture images of vehicles, their license plates, and direction of travel. Nate Mutter with the Utah Law Enforcement Legislative Committee told lawmakers that police have used those cameras for "well over a decade." Many of the cameras are owned by a company called Flock Safety.

The committee is currently brainstorming legislation to possibly add additional guardrails around the technology. Currently, under Utah law, police agencies can only access data from the cameras as part of an active criminal investigation, to locate a missing or endangered person, to arrest someone with an outstanding warrant, and to find a stolen vehicle.

Those restrictions don't apply to private companies, however, which still face some limitations on how they store and maintain their data, but are allowed much broader use of the technology.

"I think we have fairly good guidelines already as it pertains to law enforcement, but what do we do about the private vendors? That's the real crux," said Sen. Calvin Musselman, R-West Haven. "Those are the issues we need to resolve."

Police defend use of cameras

Law enforcement officers say the cameras are effective in locating suspect vehicles and investigating crimes. Chad Jensen, past president of the Utah Sheriffs Association, listed a handful of major crimes he said were solved by license plate reader cameras.

That includes a triple homicide in Wayne County earlier this year, the killing of a Santaquin police sergeant in 2024, a threat against government buildings in Salt Lake County that same year, and a human trafficking case involving two young girls in Beaver County in 2022.

"We're proud of the work Utah does and the cases that we've solved and the use of tools and technology that we've been trusted to use," Jensen said.

However, public scrutiny on the cameras has heightened. Last month, Gov. Spencer Cox ordered two state entities to conduct a privacy review following revelations that 10 cameras owned by Weber County were searched more than 5 million times since early 2022, mostly by out-of-state law enforcement agencies.

Cox said he was "deeply troubled" by those statistics, which were first brought to light through a public records request by Utah Civic Compact. The governor said he wants to ensure the cameras in Utah are "not being abused."

Christopher Bramwell, chief privacy officer in the Utah Office of Data Privacy, told lawmakers that review is underway to bring forward facts to policymakers as they decide what to do.

"I don't think (license plate reader technology) is unconstitutional," Bramwell said. "It comes down to purpose and use and processes to dictate do we have the right guardrails in place."

Questions about data use

Lawmakers also questioned how companies that contract with police agencies can use the data they collect, and whether data on Utahns can be used to train machine learning models to improve license plate reading technology.

Rep. Kristen Chevrier, R-Highland, said Utah law "does not appear to allow for captured plates to be used for AI training," but that some law enforcement contracts do allow for training data.

Herriman Police Chief Cody Stromberg, who's also part of the Utah Law Enforcement Legislative Committee, said he can't address every agency's individual contract, but that it's something to consider.

"I feel like the answer is 'we're not quite sure,'" Chevrier responded.

In a statement to KSL, a Flock spokesperson called the company's technology "an important public safety tool for law enforcement agencies across America, helping officers solve serious crimes and find missing people."

"We support thoughtful, bipartisan legislation that puts strong privacy, transparency and accountability guardrails in place while preserving law enforcement's ability to use technology responsibly to keep people safe," the statement continues.

Who controls and owns the data collected by license plate readers — the law enforcement agencies or the private companies — is another area of potential confusion, according to Stromberg.

"On behalf of Utah law enforcement, we would say there ought to be an express restriction that says that (the) Utah law enforcement agency owns the data and that the vendor or any third party can't do anything else with it outside of the parameters outlined in the contract," he said.

While lawmakers on the committee work on legislation for next year's general legislative session to add guardrails for license plate readers, it wouldn't seek to ban cameras altogether, according to Musselman, and will likely include provisions on other technologies as well.

However, other bills could still be proposed.

"(License plate readers are) hot because that's what's in the news," Musselman said, "but there's lots of other technologies that we need to have guardrails on, and they're all just as concerning."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.