Residents press trustees to delay Flock Safety expansion; board schedules presentation before vote

Chair opened public comment and residents used the three-minute period to press the board for more information before expanding the township's use of Flock Safety cameras and related drone and software systems.

Mark Monahan, a Waterford resident, urged trustees to "postpone or table this" and said he feared personal location data collected by the cameras could become publicly accessible through freedom-of-information requests and used by other agencies. True Marchesky and several other residents raised similar security concerns, including the potential for unauthorized access to camera feeds and live police-location data.

Dylan Frost, a Goodrich resident who said he previously lived in Waterford, cited budget reallocations and raised a data-retention and Fourth Amendment concern, saying officials reallocated $110,000 to initiate a three-year, $400,000 expense for drone operations and that the program could create a continuous aerial video archive. Eric Domke and other speakers told the board the technology felt "out of control" and urged trustees to reconsider purchasing more cameras or drones.

Lieutenant Scott Good, standing in for Chief Underwood, described the Flock OS product as an integration platform that pulls together existing license-plate readers, body-worn camera video and other systems "under one pane of glass," and said the project would be funded from restricted federal forfeiture funds rather than general tax dollars. Good said investigative material would generally remain exempt from disclosure under FOIA while acknowledging broader community security concerns.

Trustees debated whether the proposal added new cameras or primarily provided software integration for equipment the township already uses. Several trustees and residents asked for details about how many additional cameras or LPRs would be deployed, what AI functions would be enabled, who would have access to data and how FOIA requests would be handled.

On a roll-call vote that followed a motion to postpone, the board voted to delay final action and requested a presentation by Chief Underwood at the township's regularly scheduled Jan. 26 meeting so trustees and the public can review contract language, security measures, data-retention limits and FOIA implications before any final vote. The motion carried on roll call.