Flock cameras: 690,000 different vehicles in 30 days??

Was reading the city's transparency page on the Flock cameras and those numbers are kind of wild. About 115 cameras, roughly 690k different vehicles seen in a rolling 30 days. Little Rock is not that big... so that's basically everybody who lives here plus everyone commuting in plus every family rolling in for a weekend tournament.

Then LRPD fires one officer for looking up the same plate over and over, and three others get relieved of duty. Audits are going from quarterly to monthly now. Which, ok, good. But it took somebody getting caught for that to happen, right? Nobody was looking at those logs until then.

I'm not going to pretend it's all bad. I've seen the stories about stolen cars recovered and cases that got solved, and that's real. But it's about $345K a year, and the whole safeguard seems to have been 'trust us' until whoever it was got flagged for searching one plate again and again. That's one person with a login. How many didn't get caught?

I live down by the River Market and my car has probably been logged more times than my kid has been to practice, and that's saying something. Not anti-cop at all, just anti nobody-watching-the-watchers.

Where do y'all land? Worth it, or nope?

I'm somewhere in the middle. Recovered stolen cars and solved cases are real, and so is the worry about who's got a login.

What stuck with me is the same thing you said: the tighter audits came after somebody got caught, not before. Monthly is better, but I'd want to know who's actually reading those audits and whether the results ever get posted where regular folks can see them. The city already has a transparency page, so it doesn't seem like a big step.

Mod note since this topic can get heated fast: keep it on the program and the policy. No naming or guessing about the officers involved. Plenty of room to disagree without that.

Posting the audit results seems like the easy fix. Worth bringing up at a Board of Directors meeting, they tend to listen when folks actually show up. I'm fine with the cameras for stolen cars, I just want somebody outside LRPD reading the logs too.

Agree on the audit part. Monthly doesn't mean much if nobody outside the department ever sees what came out of it. Posting a short summary on the transparency page (number of searches, how many got flagged, what happened) would cost basically nothing.

The $345K a year is what I keep coming back to too. I pay enough in property taxes that I'd like to see numbers on what it's recovered, not just the occasional news story. Some of this stuff is great, but it should have to show its work every year when the contract comes up.

Agree with Kevin on showing the work every year. When I was younger, if the city was going to spend that kind of money on something, it was in the Gazette and somebody stood up at a meeting about it. Now it's a contract that renews and most of us hear about it after the fact.

I'm not against the cameras. A lady I know had her car taken from outside church a few years back and never saw it again, so I get why people want them. But a plain number every year on how many cases it actually helped with doesn't seem like too much to ask for $345K. And like Jerry said, somebody outside LRPD should be reading those logs.

Also, I'd bet a good chunk of that 690,000 is out-of-towners. Every Friday night in the fall, half of Arkansas drives through here for football... and the tournaments on top of that.

Fair point on the 690k, Carol. Friday nights in the fall alone, plus everybody coming in off I-30 and I-40 for tournaments, plus the Benton and Maumelle commuters. The big number doesn't bug me as much as who gets to search it. A camera on a public road, fine. One person running the same plate over and over is the real problem 🤔

Agree on the yearly number too. If it's closing cases, show it. Any other $345K contract would have to.

Randy, that's where I land too. A camera on a public road doesn't bother me. What I'd want is a case number or a reason required for every search, with that showing up in the audit. If somebody runs the same plate a bunch of times with nothing attached, it should flag itself without waiting on a monthly review.

Half joking, but my old Chevelle is easy to pick out of 690k cars. Nothing to hide, I just don't love the idea that anyone with a login could check where it's been on a Saturday.