GLENDALE — While a string of Valley cities has walked away from automated license plate cameras, the Glendale Police Department says it has no intention of following them, ABC15 reported.
Glendale has used license plate readers for more than two decades. Its current agreement with Flock Safety, which runs through September 2027, covers 58 cameras on roads across the city.
City records cited by ABC15 show Tempe, Surprise, Cave Creek and Chandler have all canceled their Flock contracts, with privacy concerns and reports of police misuse among the reasons given. Civil liberties groups, including the ACLU of Arizona, have argued that networks of plate-reading cameras let police track ordinary drivers’ movements on a large scale.
Glendale’s case for the cameras
Police Commander Scott Waite pointed to a homicide in the city about two weeks ago. He told ABC15 that, using the cameras, officers were following the suspect’s vehicle within nine minutes, keeping that person from hurting anyone else.
Waite described a set of limits the department says it follows: camera data is deleted after 30 days, only about 20% of officers have access to the system, and every search requires a report number and a supervisor’s sign-off. The department estimates officers look at roughly 0.01% of the plates captured each month and says data is shared only as part of active investigations.
He also said the police chief has warned that any employee caught using the system for anything other than criminal investigations would lose their job.
A public meeting that didn’t happen
Residents who wanted to hear the department’s case in public will have to wait. A presentation on the Flock program was scheduled for the Oct. 1 meeting of Glendale’s Citizens Transportation Oversight Commission, but the meeting was canceled because not enough members showed up to form a quorum.
Some residents of cities that dropped the cameras remain torn. A Cave Creek resident told ABC15 she sees value in using the cameras to follow a car tied to a crime, but believes their use should be limited to criminal cases.
Glendale police said they plan to keep the program as long as it keeps producing results. No new date for the oversight commission presentation had been announced as of Monday morning.
Photo: MeridioOceano via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 public domain). File photo of a Flock Safety camera in Arkansas; not a Glendale camera.