The Manitowoc Police Department has a new tool providing more transparency about a controversial piece of technology.
Police Chief John Musial says they’ve launched the Flock Camera transparency portal, which can be found under the Chief’s welcome page on the City of Manitowoc website.
Musial says the page is updated daily with information on how many cameras the city has, how many searches have been conducted, and success stories.
He adds, “If you do have concerns about Flock, go to our transparency portal, look at a lot of the information that we have on there and it probably will answer a lot of concerns that you had.”
Musial says there have been many false statements about Flock Cameras, including “being able to determine races of operators and tracking people, and that we can watch people whatever we want.”
Residents across Wisconsin have expressed concern about the cameras after incidents such as police officers misusing them to track ex-partners and flagging the license plates of people who haven’t done anything criminal.
Musial says he believes in protecting people’s rights, but the license plate cameras do “provide officers critical information that they might not otherwise have been able to obtain, or it could have been impossible to obtain.”
