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Just five months after launch, the City of Lynnwood paused its Flock license plate reader cameras altogether after a University of Washington study found that two out-of-state law enforcement agencies accessed the City’s database for immigration-related searches, breaking promises made by the Lynnwood Police Department when the City Council approved the cameras in January.
LPD on Oct. 29 shut off access to Lynnwood camera data to any outside agency, even ones within the state and county, Lynnwood Police Chief Cole Langdon said in an email read Monday by Mayor Christine Frizzell at a City Council meeting.
“I’ve taken the further step of pausing our ALPR program in its entirety until we can access assess and fully ensure that the cameras are used in a manner that furthers our public safety efforts while appropriately balancing our community’s right to privacy in a manner that is sustainable for my staff,” Langdon wrote.
The Council and police department faced public backlash after the UW study determined external law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accessed license plate camera data from at least 17 Washington law enforcement agencies. The findings were published Oct. 21 by the UW Center for Human Rights in the study Leaving the Door Wide Open: Flock Surveillance Systems Expose Washington Data to Immigration Enforcement.
While federal agencies never directly accessed Lynnwood’s data, UW researchers found that the Jacksonville, Florida and Franklin County, Pennsylvania Sheriff’s Offices listed “immigration” as the reason for searches on July 2, 3 and 7. Neither department has fulfilled Lynnwood Today’s records requests for more information.
When seeking council approval in January, Langdon said the cameras would only be used to trace vehicles involved in crimes. He assured the council that they would not be used for immigration enforcement or to track people seeking health care, as prohibited under Washington law.
Langdon said the department never directly granted out-of-state agencies access to its data. He said Flock enrolled Lynnwood, against LPD’s knowledge, in a nationwide lookup program, giving 8,000 agencies in the program access to each other’s data. The department caught the breach two days after the cameras went live and shut down the nationwide feature immediately, Langdon told Lynnwood Today last month.
At an Oct. 27 Council meeting, residents called on the City to shut down the cameras citing surveillance concerns — specifically around immigration.
Frizzell on Monday said that even though the Flock cameras “have been extremely effective from a public safety standpoint, we do understand that there are some reservations to them and we want to make sure that we’re able to deal with those in a responsible and forthright manner.”
Read more about the UW study and the cameras here.
— Contact Ashley at ashley@myedmondsnews.com.
This is a great first step towards restoring privacy to Lynnwood! We need to keep the pressure up to cancel the contract, a warrantless dragnet surveillance network is not who we are as a city. Please come to council on November 10th at 6pm to give comment on this matter, alternately you can submit a written comment which will be read in the public comment section of the meeting. Please see my DeFlockLynnwood website linked on my profile for more information, including links to the petition to remove these, and links for submitting written public comment.
This contract should be cancelled. There are benefits for public safety associated with this program, but they are outweighed by the potential for its abuse.
If you consider stolen vehicles as an example, according to 2024 Lynnwood Police Department crime report, thefts were down to 179 from a peak of 364 in 2023. This is a historical low relative to the prior 6 years.
One of the factors driving the 2023 peak is rooted in legislative changes that impaired law enforcement’s ability to enforce laws. Representative Lauren Davis has recently raised this as an issue that needs to be addressed:
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/wa-lawmaker-how-my-missteps-fueled-juvenile-violence/
The city should be supportive of her efforts this legislative session and drop the mass surveillance program.
You can send the Lynnwood Police Department with your concerns about this program to crimeprevention_flocksafety@LynnwoodWA.gov.