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Gig Harbor council hears debate over grant-funded license-plate cameras; contract to return to council March 24
Summary
Police chief described a $33,000 state grant to install 10 automated license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras at city choke points; council members raised privacy, data-control and federal-subpoena concerns. Staff will bring a vendor contract to council on March 24 for approval.
Gig Harbor Police Chief Brian Busey told the City Council on March 13 that the department received a roughly $33,000 state grant to install 10 automated license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras at traffic choke points and is prepared to move forward with the purchase and first year of service.
The chief said the cameras would capture license plates and the rear image of vehicles and automatically check plates against state and national databases to flag stolen or wanted vehicles. “This technology just captures a record of the license plates and a photo of the make and model of the vehicle,” Chief Busey said.
The department presented the vendor Block (brand name Flock) and invited Kristen McLeod of Block Safety to answer questions. McLeod said the system uses machine learning to sort vehicle attributes and that the vendor stores data on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) government-cloud instance; she said the…
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