Council approves Flock Group agreement for cameras and first-responder drones after adding legal data safeguards

The Green Bay City Council on Dec. 16 approved a multi-part agreement with Flock Group that renews and expands the city—s automated license-plate reader (ALPR) deployment and adds a two-launch-location drone first-responder (DFR) program intended to provide rapid situational awareness for emergency calls.

The total contract value discussed in public testimony was about $1.3 million over five years; councilmembers and staff said the incremental cost to add the drones over the ALPR renewal is about $170,000 per year. Chief Davis of the Green Bay Police Department described the drones as first-responder tools intended to give quick situational awareness on emergent calls, not persistent random surveillance. "This is not a piece of, of surveillance technology," he said, explaining policy safeguards and use limits.

Public commenters overwhelmingly raised privacy and security concerns, citing media coverage and legal scrutiny of the vendor elsewhere. Speakers asked whether vendor systems can be accessed externally, questioned retention and sharing policies, and urged steering funds to social services. "There—s too much surveillance already," one commenter said; another cited potential security vulnerabilities in the vendor's hardware.

Flock representatives joined the meeting online and disputed claims that their systems had been compromised. "It—s categorically false. We have never been hacked," a company representative told the council and said the company supports multifactor authentication and logging. Flock and vendor staff described flight performance, battery life, night capability, estimated coverage radius (about 3.5 miles per launch location for the vendor's aircraft) and typical flight/recharge cycles.

Councilmembers pressed the chiefs and vendor on who can launch drones, footage retention and the circumstances under which recordings could be released to outside agencies. Chief Davis said drones would be launched by trained department employees in response to qualifying calls; recordings would follow department retention rules used for body-worn and in-car cameras and would be preserved only when necessary for evidence or investigation. Officers emphasized that the default camera attitude en route would be the horizon to reduce random capture.

Amendment and approval: amid public concern, alderpersons Johnson and others successfully added an amendment requiring the city attorney to review contract language to ensure the city owns and controls data, that access logs are visible to the city, and that violation of those terms would constitute a breach allowing contract termination. After adoption of that amendment, the council approved the agreement as amended.

Council members said they will continue policy oversight and pursue contract language clarifications where needed; no changes to state or federal law were made at the meeting.