Author: KJZZ | By Mark Brodie
A social justice group based in Tucson is calling on the University of Arizona to end its contract with Flock Safety. The company makes license plate readers and has gained attention recently for its sharing of data with law enforcement agencies.
A recent investigation by 404 Media found that data was being used for immigration-related enforcement, even though the feds do not have a contract with Flock.
Prerana Sannappanavar, higher education reporter with the Arizona Daily Star, has written about this. She joined The Show to talk about UA’s role in this controversy.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So what is the situation at the U of A? How many of these license plate readers does U of A have on its campus?
SANNAPPANAVAR: According to the contract that the U of A has with Flock Safety, there’s about 62 Flock Safety products, but the community organization that is leading this campaign, Desert Rising, actually states that there’s 54 specific cameras, so there’s 54 cameras across the U of A campus.
BRODIE: And am I right that this is a fairly new development at the UA? Like these haven’t been there all that long.
SANNAPPANAVAR: Yes, yes. According to the contract, the U of A started with Flock Safety in February of this year, and the contract is going to last for about five years, and the U of A is investing about $160,000 per annum into these products. So for five years that’s going to be about 800,000.
BRODIE: OK, so what does Desert Rising say? Like what is their opposition to having these cameras, having these license plate readers around campus?
SANNAPPANAVAR: So I think there are several community organizations, obviously it started with Desert Rising, but there’s other community organizations like UA Resist and United Campus Workers Arizona as well. I think their concern is that this isn’t just about safety, this is about surveillance because the automated license plate readers that Flock Safety supplies, they record everything. It’s not just the license plate: the make and model of the car, the if the car has any stickers, the color of it. So all of that is being recorded, even if it’s not a camera that’s recording faces.
So I think that surveillance, especially now in the current time where there’s so much heavy intense immigration stuff happening, even at the U of A campus where there were so many student visa revocations, which happened, and obviously Tucson has also seen immigration related stuff. So in the midst of all of this, this additional surveillance is something that they’re worried about.
BRODIE: Have the groups specifically said that they’re worried about immigration related activity?
SANNAPPANAVAR: Yes, they did say that, and I think the U of A’s response has kind of been like, we’re still looking at safety. The University of Arizona Police Department Chief Chris Olson, he also said that we’re using the data that Flock Safety collects for misdemeanor and felony offenses for investigating stuff like that, and also said that the data is deleted after 30 days.
But I think one of the other things that the community organizations are worried about is that the U of A did not explicitly give out this information to the community, so there’s also confusion. There is, you know, not enough information about exactly where the information is being shared with how many agencies. And I think they just want to know more, and that is also something where they’re saying that it violates civil rights.
BRODIE: Well, so you say that the groups want to learn more. Is the U of A being forthcoming about this information? Like, have they said anything to address the critics’ concerns about these cameras being used in immigration enforcement?
SANNAPPANAVAR: Yes, I think beyond stating the reasons for which this information is being used — misdemeanor and felony offenses — beyond that, I think the U of A and UAPD have said that the information that Flock Safety collects is not going to be shared with any local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies without the U of A’s permission or without a court order.
But what they did not clarify is if there was any prior approval given by the U of A or UAPD to any other agencies, or if there was any other court order which gives them that access as well. So that hasn’t been clarified.
BRODIE: So Prerana, I’m hoping you might be able to put this into the national context. As I mentioned in the introductionm this company has been fairly controversial — not just in Arizona, but all over the place for similar kinds of things that folks in Tucson are concerned about. How does this story fit into sort of that national context?
SANNAPPANAVAR: So when 404 Media came out with its investigation in May, the kind of information that came out was, I think, concerning and controversial. Because what they showed, what the investigation showed, is that there’s been about 4,000 nation- and statewide lookups across the country by local and state police, which was done either at the behest of the federal government or as an “informal favor” to federal law enforcement.
And in the Flock Safety database, when someone does a search, there’s this field called the reason field, where the person has to put in the reason for why the search is being done. And the answers which were found by 404 Media were, you know, immigration or ICE, which is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE plus ERO, which is ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations section, which focuses on deportations.
And 404 Media also found that while these searches involving ICE were made during both the Biden and the Trump administration, searches which explicitly stated the reasons as immigration were made mostly since January, since President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
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