Centralia Police Chief Stacy Denham updated the Centralia City Council on his department’s progress to install Flock Safety cameras at last week’s meeting.
The project includes a two-month trial period Denham initially requested during a Sept. 13, 2022, council meeting.
Many of the Flock Safety cameras have already been installed. Denham said the rest should be installed by the end of the week. The cameras have already helped catch a drug dealer who recently sold fentanyl laced cocaine to a Centralia resident, the police chief said.
“We were able to identify the name of the individual that sold him the cocaine the night before that sent him to Harborview (Medical Center),” Denham said. “With that, we know who the vehicle was registered to and we decided to put that Idaho license plate number into our Flock Safety system, and since we’re tied into the system with Tukwila and other agencies that have Flock Safety now, we immediately got a hit from that morning where a person drove through a Flock Safety camera.”
Denham said it would have been unlikely for the police department to track down the suspect without the help of the cameras.
Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based security company that specializes in automated license plate recognition technology.
The cameras are designed to provide law enforcement with leads they need to start investigations by providing departments with license plate numbers and vehicle descriptions that include the make, model and color of the vehicle.
Flock Safety cameras aren’t completely dependent on license plate numbers, though, since using only visual vehicle descriptions can still track suspect vehicles.
Denham explained that is especially useful when they search for shoplifting suspects who often remove license plates before going to a store to steal and then put the plates back on at a different location afterwards.
Denham hopes the Flock Safety cameras will help assist the department with the rise of shoplifting cases Centralia has experienced. He noted the Yakima Police Department has found the cameras also help officers track down stolen vehicles faster.
“That’s the one thing that Yakima PD discovered, their recovery of stolen vehicles went straight through the roof,” Denham said.
Aside from the cameras the city is testing, Denham stated business owners can contact Flock Safety and pay for cameras to be installed near their businesses. He said only the Centralia Police Department will have access to the surveillance.
The Yakima Police Department, which had 20 Flock Safety cameras in September, have installed more since then and have another 40 on the way, “because it’s been such a success for them,” Denham added.
Yakima was the first city in Washington to install the cameras, but since September, that number has now grown to 30 municipalities in the state that utilizes the cameras, according to Denham.
Many of those other agencies are also adding more Flock Safety cameras on top of the initial ones they tested because of the success they have experienced.
Not only can the Centralia Police Department access Flock Safety data from other cities in Washington, but they also have access to others across the country since the system is nationwide. As long as a city has the cameras already installed, the police department can access data from them.
The cameras do not have facial recognition technology and aren’t used for traffic citation enforcement either, according to Hector Soliman-Valdez, a senior community engagement manager for Flock Safety who also spoke during the September meeting.
There’s no personal identifiable information,” Soliman-Valdez previously said. “It’s providing clues and investigative leads.”
Data recorded by Flock Safety cameras is stored for 30 days, since the cameras are not meant for long-term surveillance. Soliman-Valdez explained the 30-day period was chosen since most crimes, even ones that aren’t reported on the day they occur, are usually reported soon after.
“If someone goes on vacation for 14 days, and then notices five days later, they need to be able to report that crime,” Soliman-Valdez said in September. “This data will still be available to commence that investigation. We don’t want long-term surveillance or anything close to that, which is why the 30 days is what we’ve seen works nationwide to provide police time to follow up on leads.”
Flock Safety utilizes Amazon Web Services government cloud storage to collect and store its data, and does not share or sell the data to others. The cloud is the same one used by the FBI and CIA, according to Soliman-Valdez.
If the City of Centralia decides to keep the cameras after the free two-month trial period ends, the cost will be $2,500 per camera with the software included.
For more information on the Centralia Police Departments’s Flock Safety system, visit the Flock Safety transparency portal at https://transparency.flocksafety.com/centralia-pd-wa.
“When we look back, had we had these cameras over the past several months before they actually got installed, they would’ve helped us on two murders, countless thefts, multiple hit-and-runs and most recently, a stalking situation,” Denham said.
