DENVER — A community-led town hall meeting will be held Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. to discuss the city’s use of Flock cameras.
A Flock camera is a license plate reader that can capture images of a vehicle’s license plate.
“It (the meeting) will provide additional space and voice to the conversation that is being had through at the task force level, as well as for the mayor, who ultimately does make the decision," explained Serena Gonzales-Guttierrez, Denver city councilmember at-large.
"He has executive authority, as he's reminded me," she continued. “As council, we are doing our best for those checks and balances, right? So if a contract is under $500,000, which happened in the case of the contract that we voted down back in April, May, they then went ahead and continued the contract, but did it under the threshold of $500,000, which then took away our authority to have to approve a contract.”
The mayor does not need city council approval for contracts under $500,000.
On Wednesday morning, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s office announced an agreement to extend the Flock contact, that will also prohibit data from license plate readers in Denver from being shared with the federal government.
Denver
Denver bans sharing of Flock camera data with the federal government
“Hearing from our community members who are the very subject of this surveillance is incredibly important to be able to know how they feel about it, what ideas they might have, and if they're asking us to maybe turn them off while we continue to mitigate the concerns, then I think we should listen to them,” Gonzales-Guttierez said. “There has been breaches of access to the data, to Denver data, and that we know for sure. And so those breaches have been via other jurisdictions that we share with, and we also know that we have in the past, and even most recently, allowed access to federal agents. And so there is a concern for vulnerable community members out in our community.”
Denver City Councilmember Sarah Parady who also plans to attend the town hall said the Flock contract extension has not taken into consideration community concerns.
“I was a little shocked at the jump, because I serve on a task force that the mayor put together," she said. "He promised to council that he would create such a task force last spring, when this prior contract was voted down over some of these privacy concerns. And so I'm on that task force. We've been trucking along, still in a very information-sharing phase, because this is a pretty complicated set of tech. And so then yesterday, spoke to the mayor and learned that he is planning on signing another unilateral extension, and with conditions that he, as he put it to me, negotiated with the CEO of Flock.”
Parady said Mayor Johnston’s decision feels like it was made without considering additional information.
“There's all this expertise available to him, all these folks he could have spoken with. Reproductive rights organizations have started to get really concerned and been reaching out to him," she said.
One organization sent him a letter with their recommendations.
"This was done without those being taken into account," Parady said. "It's not been a very democratic process, and I wish that the task force have been allowed to do what it was designed to do."
Parady said it’s imperative for the mayor to listen to those who could be directly impacted by this decision, especially as the city requests permission to install infrastructure for new cameras in Denver neighborhoods.
“Some of our neighborhood groups became alarmed when they got asked to approve permits for new flock cameras,” Parady said.
The community town hall was organized by Whittier Neighborhood Association, East Colfax Neighborhood Association, and Villa Park Neighborhood Association and is supported by organizations including the ACLU of Colorado, the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, Together Colorado, and PSL Denver.
The event will be held at 2650 E .40th Ave. in Denver.
