COMMERCE CITY, Colo. — While communities in the Denver metro have cut ties with the controversial license plate reader company Flock Safety, one police department is expanding their partnership with them.
Commerce City Police Department's Real Time Crime Center and Drones as First Responders program launched a few months ago, and since then, they said it's been a game changer.
Watch this story in the video player below:
"Fourteen percent of the calls [for service] during the month of March for the Commerce City Police Department's patrol division were cleared by drones allowing for officers to go and engage in other activities," said Commander Jeremy Jenkins.
Also in March, their four drones launched 391 times for various calls for service.
Flock supplies the city's more than two dozen license plate readers, 11 so-called Point To Zoom stationary cameras on public right of ways, and the soon to be 6 total drones after funding was recently approved to expand the program. Those six drones will collectively be able to cover the entire city when launched.
Commerce City
'Drones as First Responder' program takes flight in Commerce City
It's that type of growing combination of surveillance in Colorado communities that concerns the American Civil Liberties Union.
"When we really amplify surveillance technology to that scale, we're really toeing that line of whether or not the Fourth Amendment is being infringed upon when we're using all of these various types of surveillance technology," said Anaya Robinson, Public Policy Director at the ACLU of Colorado.
It's that vast reach that Commerce City PD argues is exactly what makes these such effective crime fighting tools.
They report they've used drones to avoid dangerous high speed chases, cut response times and find wanted or missing people quickly.
Similar stories have been reported from other police departments that have since ended their Flock contracts.
When asked what Commerce City was doing differently that made the department confident to continue their partnership with Flock, Jenkins said Commerce City decides who is going to see their information.
"We own the information that is gathered by these devices. We do not share information outside of the state of Colorado," he said. "One of the main reasons for that is, we know that any agency that utilizes Flock technology within the state of Colorado is following the same legal guidelines that we're held to, so there's no question where that data is going is going to be used within the same legal guidelines that we're required to operate within."
He also said they do not share their data with any federal agency.
Denver
Denver City Council narrowly approves Axon contract to replace Flock cameras
The police department notes none of their Flock technology is used to proactively surveil, it's only used specifically after an actual call for service.
"Anytime a drone leaves a dock in the city, it's recorded. If it's for an actual call for service, if it's a training flight for operators, if it's a demonstration, every one of the flights is recorded and it's stored per our retention policies for digital evidence here," he said. "Like anything else, when we generate a body camera file, if it's non-evidentiary in value, it's retained for 30 days in case we need to go back for whatever reason. After 30 days, the systems automatically purge that data."
The ACLU acknowledges that there could be a legitimate purpose for those types of technology, but as communities decide whether or not to use them, they argue there's something important that should happen first.
"Meaningful regulation is what is absolutely necessary in this space. Too few governments, whether it's at the national level, the state level or the municipal level, are not looking at those regulations, oftentimes meaningfully enough to impose them before they start engaging in a contract with a different vendor," said Robinson.
