Residents packed a city council meeting, which had to be held at the opera house due to the crowd, demanding the removal of Flock cameras in Woodstock as they referred to it as “mass surveillance.”
The Woodstock City Council held a regular council meeting on Tuesday evening, which had to be moved to the Woodstock Opera House’s auditorium to accommodate the number of attendees.
While the council was not set to discuss any topics related to surveillance cameras, a large number of attendees were there regarding Flock cameras.
Don Francis, who is behind “Stop Flock in Woodstock,” a local resistance group, spoke during the public comment period of the meeting.
Francis said during the council meeting that the cameras constitute “mass surveillance” and residents do not want that in their hometown.
He said the group would “not be going anywhere” until the cameras were removed.
The Woodstock City Council had previously approved a three-year agreement with Flock Safety Group in February for six surveillance video cameras for the Woodstock Square.
The measure narrowly passed in a 4-3 vote after it had previously failed to pass in November due to a 3-3 tie vote when the mayor was absent from the council meeting.
The city was already in a separate, five-year agreement with Flock for 13 automated license plate readers (ALPR) in the city and on the Woodstock Square.
There has recently been a growing nationwide trend of resistance to Flock cameras due to privacy concerns.
Francis said his group is not anti-police or anti-camera but is “very concerned” about Flock’s data gathering and what they do with that data.
“We believe mass surveillance and data collection on this scale infringes on our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, and we are hoping our elected officials will listen to their constituents about this,” he said.
The group says they object to Flock’s poor hardware security and access controls and the company’s business model of aggregating, sharing and selling data to hundreds of jurisdictions across Illinois.
“This practice resulted in multiple cases of law enforcement stalking nationwide, including at least four in Illinois and one in McHenry County,” the group said.
In June, Holiday Hills Police Chief William Copp, who was a part-time police officer in Prairie Grove, was charged with conducting hundreds of searches through the Flock system unrelated to any official law enforcement investigation while on and off duty to allegedly track people he knew, including the ex-boyfriend of a woman he also dated.
Dozens of people spoke out during the meeting against Flock.
One woman who spoke during the meeting listed off cities that have canceled their contracts with Flock Safety, which she called an unregulated tech company.
A man who spoke said the cameras are a “total dismantling of our constitutional rights.”
Stop Flock in Woodstock has said that there have been several instances of Flock Safety’s systems misidentifying license plates, leading law enforcement to pursue or arrest citizens in error.
The group recently created a petition calling for the city to end all contracts with Flock Safety Group.
Stop Flock in Woodstock is requesting the city to instead find a closed-circuit option from a “reputable vendor after proper due diligence and community input.”
The group says they have collected over 2,000 signatures, with over 1,300 being from McHenry County.
City officials spoke out last week, saying that the cameras in public areas are used to assist the Woodstock Police Department with public safety and criminal investigations.
The city currently operates three types of camera systems, including the xix fixed-position cameras located in public areas of the Square. “These cameras provide video footage to assist officers with investigations and are not Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs).”
The second type of camera system is the Benton and Main Street security cameras, which are fixed-position security cameras located at key intersections and are not operated by Flock.
“This system operates independently from Flock and serves the same public safety and investigative purpose, subject to the same guidelines governing officer use and access,” they said.
The third type of camera system is the Flock ALPRs, which are a network of 13 license plate readers. They are designed to capture and analyze license plate information to assist with investigations.
“All three systems are subject to the Woodstock Police Department’s General Order #30-007, which establishes requirements for authorized use, access, data retention, auditing and accountability,” the city said.
“Footage and data captured by these systems are automatically and permanently deleted after 30 days unless preserved as evidence or otherwise required to be retained by law,” they added.
The city announced on August 14 that it had rolled out a transparency portal regarding the Flock camera systems.
The portal showed that data is retained for 30 days and Flock has detected over 232,000 license plates in the prior 30 days, with over 1,600 being on a “hotlist.” The department conducted 31 searches in that period.
The portal also showed that the Woodstock Police Department shares the data with police departments and villages across the state.
Emails between Woodstock Police Chief John Lieb and Flock Safety representatives show the police chief called the situation an “unnecessary political storm” in November, when the initial vote on the Flock video cameras in the Square failed to pass.
Lieb also informed Flock that “someone in town” was trying to negatively sway the November vote. He also forwarded an email to them that the city council received from someone opposing the Flock camera expansion.
“I’m not quite sure what’s behind someone’s campaign to keep Woodstock less safe,” Lieb said in an email.
Residents at city council meetings have said they were worried about allowing outside agencies to have access to the system.
Other residents previously said the Woodstock Square is a place for people to shop and visit and that the cameras would change the city by having “Big Brother” watching.