The city of San Marcos is looking for a new license plate recognition camera vendor after city council elected not to renew a contract with Flock Safety in a tied vote.
Flock Safety, which provides license plate recognition cameras for police departments, has been a divisive community issue. Hays County recently canceled its contract with the company with commissioners who voted to terminate the contract citing issues with the company itself.
The San Marcos City Council ultimately gave direction not to renew the contract with Flock Group, Inc. related to the police department’s license plate recognition cameras and associated software at the Dec. 2 meeting. The current contract ends Dec. 29 of this year.
Agenda documents shed light into the history of the contract, which the city originally entered into with Flock Safety on April 19, 2022. City staff entered into a revised contract with an initial 2-year term, with three optional one-year renewals on Dec. 29, 2023. Council postponed a Flock contract amendment on April 1 of this year. Council authorized the two grant applications that required a 20% match by the city — $15,400 — in May. According to previous reporting by the Daily Record, the council voted five to two in favor of a motion to deny the police department’s ability to amend the contract to add 19 additional cameras in June, and SMPD ceased all automatic sharing of camera data with outside law enforcement agencies in the same month.
San Marcos Police Chief Stan Standridge sent a letter to the council in June that was included in meeting documents, which stated that the police department has been working to address “privacy concerns” related to the cameras. Those changes included SMPD disabling five of its cameras to only operate 14. It now only shares data with other police departments upon request and with proof of a specific criminal investigation or prosecution of certain crimes.
At the meeting Tuesday, City Manager Stephanie Reyes said she has administrative authority to renew the agreement for an additional one-year term, but “given the level of community interest and the ongoing policy discussion,” she wanted to get direction from council.
Councilmember Amanda Rodriguez said she couldn’t support renewal and pointed to problems with the vendor, listing approximately ten active lawsuits against cities across the nation due to their “relationship with Flock.”
“Now the conversation has really started to turn into whether or not we as a city are going to willingly continue to put ourselves in risk of legal liability on top of all of the other risks that come with that,” Rodriguez said.
The topic turned to crime, and Chief Standridge gave an example of when the cameras proved beneficial. He said, although city operated cameras provided the initial image of the vehicle of the perpetrator of the deadly Halloween shooting, Flock cameras were instrumental in locating the vehicle as those cameras were able to capture the license plate.
“The initial video footage related to the downtown homicide in October was from Fire Station 1, which was a city of San Marcos camera that provided the initial image of the vehicle. The downtown cameras were able to discern the same vehicle and its plan of travel,” Standridge said. “Flock was then used to identify the actual license plate of eight possible matches, so within about three and a half hours, through Flock, we were able to find the correct vehicle.”
Councilmember Saul Gonzales asked if the federal government or anyone else could access the cameras at any point in time.
City Attorney Sam Aguirre confirmed that the cameras could be hacked at any point and higher governmental authorities could subpoena data for a specific purpose, but that would not give them unfettered access.
After discussion, three council members (Mayor Jane Hughson, Matthew Mendoza and Shane Scott) voted to renew for one year then find another vendor and three voted to not renew (Amanda Rodriguez, Alyssa Garza and Saul Gonzales). Councilmember Lorenzo Gonzalez recused himself.
Aguirre explained that due to the lack of four votes in favor of renewal the status quo would remain, and the optional renewal allowed in the 2023 contract would not be exercised.
The council gave direction to begin looking for a new license plate recognition camera vendor and do everything possible to expedite the process.
