Little black poles topped with cameras have been popping up along Okaloosa County roadways, and residents want to know what they are.
- The Okaloosa Board of County Commissioners addressed those questions Tuesday during an informational presentation about license plate reader technology being used by the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office through a contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company.
“I’ve had several inquiries from citizens about what are these little black poles with the camera that are popping up in all the right of ways,” Chairman Trey Goodwin said. “What are these things?”
The answer: 28 cameras currently operate on 26 county-maintained roadways, permitted through the sheriff’s office contract with Flock Safety. The permits were approved at the staff level without coming before the board for discussion.
“They were as much a surprise to me as I think some of the people that were asking questions about it,” Goodwin said.
Deputy County Administrator Jason Autrey explained the sheriff’s office uses the technology as a “manpower multiplier” to track vehicles during investigations. When deputies have a license plate they’re trying to locate, they can query the database to identify where the vehicle has traveled.
- The sheriff’s office has used the system to recover stolen vehicles, locate missing persons, track down kidnapping victims and identify shooting suspects, Autrey said. In one case, he noted, a mother reported her 15-year-old daughter had been taken by an uncle she believed was headed north. The LPR data helped authorities locate the vehicle in Ocala instead.
Flock Safety, founded in 2017, provides LPR services to approximately 6,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. According to the company’s contract terms, all data collected belongs to the sheriff’s office, and Flock does not sell customer data. The information is stored in a cloud-based system accessible only to authorized users designated by the sheriff’s office.
Commissioner Sherri Cox raised concerns about law enforcement officers themselves being tracked through the system.
“I worry about this for our public safety professionals, in addition to our citizens,” Cox said. “The fact that our LEOs are marked very clearly and that information available for a third party vendor bothers me a good bit.”
Commissioner Paul Mixon offered a different perspective, acknowledging mixed feelings about the technology while pointing to the broader reality of modern surveillance.
- “I think sometimes we forget how advanced technology is,” Mixon said. “It’d be much easier to just look and see where their cell phone is or where their vehicle is at any time.”
He noted that license plate readers don’t appear on private roads precisely because those roads are private, but public roads funded by taxpayers are inherently public spaces.
“I’m not the biggest fan, but that doesn’t mean I can oppose it because I drive with as a privilege on a public road that I pay public taxes to be a part of,” Mixon said.
He acknowledged the discomfort some residents feel about vehicle tracking but said similar data collection already permeates daily life.
- “I at times could talk myself into being fearful over the idea that somebody knows where each vehicle is at all times,” Mixon said. “And then I open my phone to look at pictures, and I have an option to hit a map and it goes around the world and I can zoom in anywhere that I’ve been and see where I took that picture, at what time I took the picture.”
Mixon said his initial concern centered on the lack of public notice when the cameras first appeared. He called that a communication issue that has since been addressed. He also noted that other law enforcement technology, such as Axon equipment used for tasers, similarly stores evidence in cloud-based systems without significant public discussion.
Still, he acknowledged limits to what county government can control regarding data storage and third-party vendors.
Goodwin emphasized that citizens he’s spoken with generally support law enforcement having access to investigative tools. Their primary concern, he said, is the data being housed by an unknown private entity rather than a government server.
“There’s this distinction between a security camera and a spy cam,” Goodwin said. “I think people can embrace security cameras. I don’t think people like spy cams, and these feel because of the way they’re put out there, they feel a little more like a spy cam.”
- He suggested the cameras could be marked to identify them, similar to how businesses prominently display security cameras as deterrents.
Autrey clarified that Okaloosa County itself does not use license plate readers for any purpose. Traffic cameras at intersections are used only for real-time monitoring and do not record or store video. He said the county has also changed its policy to no longer permit any citation-generating cameras on county roadways, such as school zone speed cameras.
Commissioner Drew Palmer questioned what an audit of the data system would look like and noted that cloud-based storage is standard practice because local data storage would be financially burdensome for government entities.
County staff said they would follow up with the sheriff’s office about potential data integrity audits to provide additional assurance to residents.
The presentation required no board action.
One Response
What troubles me about them is the fact Texas authorities used the same cameras across the nation to look for a woman who was fleeing an abusive boyfriend. The boyfriend alleged she was missing and endangered. Flock used 7,000 cameras to locate her. What’s to say law enforcement won’t enable another situation like this?