11–20 of 83 posts
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems? It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with fo…
I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems? It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with fo…
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach. ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.) It’d be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder what Tiburon will be doing. They’ve had ALPRs since forever as they only have one road in and one road out, so it’s easy fo…
There is an interesting thing happening in FOIA law here in WA (you'd never notice it from this spammy article, though). A pretty common FOIA exemption is for data not managed by a public body, but via some commercial vendor. FOIA generally only allows you to demand production of (1) actual documents that (2) the public body has (3) on hand (or are generally deemed to have on hand, such as email records).
So it's pretty legally dubious that you can use FOIA to compel production from Flock (you can probably compel, from the public body, any number of reports Flock can generate --- we've done that here for our Flock network and sharing configurations, for instance).
Here it sounds like a WA judge might be saying that some corpus of data Flock maintains is effectively public data. If that's the case, that's a novel interpretation.
I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems? It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with fo…
My 2 cents: Police body cameras capture events at random locations. These other cameras are fixed in place and can more reliably be used to stalk people.
If I assume that 1/3rd of my city's sworn officers are on duty at any time, there's literally more cameras than officers around town.
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
The only political party to even mention this as a problem was the pirate party back 15 years ago, and even then it never became a major issue that got discussed. Like paying with credit cards rather than physical cash, people see it as convenience or just as the way things now work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they not allowed to charge a service fee?
If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
They're not panicking about this in Illinois, because Illinois exempts raw ALPR footage from FOIA. This page is blogspam, though.
Both good points; I should have linked the original post at https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
I don't understand the correlation here, why does having to release the footage mean that the cities are shutting down the systems? It seems like they could simply comply with the requirement that footage is public and they can/must share that footage as part of the FOIA process, I don't see much of a downside there and it seems like something which most police departments and municipalities are already doing with fo…
Or as Thomas stated elsewhere in this thread, they can follow Illinois and just exempt ALPRs from FOIA reach. ALPR FOIAs have the potential problem of abuse by stalkers and others wanting to track someone (imagine “Hollywood” personæs.) It’d be a bad precedent to follow, but they could. I wonder what Tiburon will be doing. They’ve had ALPRs since forever as they only have one road in and one road out, so it’s easy fo…
Not potential problems, actual existing problems: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...