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Texas cities set their own price on police Flock records, up to $2.3 million
North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth suburb, quoted a privacy group $2.3 million for records on how its police use Flock plate cameras. Because each Texas city prices these requests itself, whether the public can check police searches comes down to a local estimate of staff time.
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What happened
- Irving asked $70,000 for Flock records that Carrollton released for free, while Sealy charged nothing at all.
- Houston television station KPRC was quoted $121,000 for its own Flock records request.
- Zachary Anthony Klein, the Lufkin officer whose searches an audit exposed, pleaded guilty on 30 September to 100 felony counts and was sentenced to five years.
- The Texas Department of Public Safety answered an identical request in July, then limited August's to its own searches and asked the Attorney General's Office to let it withhold the data.
- Britain's number plate recognition standards, updated in July, require audit trails of every successful and failed search and delete national read data after 90 days.
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Why it matters
- cost Requesters carry the risk of the estimate: a group filing with more than 200 agencies cannot budget when the same category of record is free in one city and costs tens of thousands of dollars in the next.
- constraint Records requests are how officer misuse in Texas has come to light, and a seven-figure quote shuts that route to anyone who cannot pay it.
- decision An agency that publishes search records through Flock's portal takes the who-searched question out of any fee dispute, leaving only its internal communications to price.
- precedent If the Attorney General's Office lets DPS withhold Flock data entirely, other Texas agencies gain a ruling to cite when they refuse the same requests.
Phil Mynona has asked more than 200 law enforcement agencies for Flock records on behalf of the Texas Privacy Coalition, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assess fees [5]. Some sent more than 400,000 pages for free. Others charged $5,000 [5]. Mynona told the Texas Tribune the North Richland Hills fee seemed "ludicrous" [4].
The quote is mostly a price on staff time spent reading. City officials said the cost came from searching "about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system" [3]. They put that at 14 years of labour at $15 an hour [2]. At that rate, $2.3 million buys about 153,000 hours [20]. Spread across 14 years, the hours come to about five full-time staff [21].
The record of who searched for what is a separate file, and it can be counted. A USA Today request set off an audit in Lufkin that caught officer Zachary Anthony Klein searching police databases for his former girlfriend, her family and men she had dated [8]. Records showed 45,318 searches across 210 days, about 216 a day, with one plate queried 3,470 times [c10, d4]. Ars Technica, citing anti-surveillance groups, reports that records like these have triggered audits, arrests and decisions to get rid of cameras [11].
Flock's own answer is a transparency portal. In Texas, 59 agencies use the portals, covering 2,600 of the state's roughly 13,000 Flock cameras, according to The Next Web [c12, c11]. The portals reach about a fifth of the cameras [22]. Sixteen of those agencies publish their search records, the page that answers the who-searched question before anyone files a request [13]. The other 43 do not [23].
The EU writes the log into law. Its law enforcement directive requires police systems to log every consultation and disclosure, recording the justification, the date and time, who searched and who received the data [15]. Controllers must hand those logs to the data protection authority on request, with no fee and no labour estimate [15]. The Next Web points out that the logs go to the regulator, not the public, and calls that a different bargain and not a better one [16].
Any deployment can be placed on two axes. One is whether the search log is produced by default or only when someone asks. The other is whether it goes to a regulator or to the public. EU police sit in the default-and-regulator box [15]. The 16 Texas portal agencies sit in default-and-public [13]. North Richland Hills is on-request-and-public, at a price the city sets [1]. If the Attorney General's Office grants the Department of Public Safety's request to withhold the data entirely, the state police leave the public column altogether [14].
I'd want the search log in one of the default boxes, and choosing between them is a real trade. The regulator route keeps individual searches out of public view [16]. Public access is how Klein's searches came out [8]. Neither box covers the communications about misuse. Someone still has to read those, and that reading is what North Richland Hills priced at $2.3 million [c3, c1].
What to watch
- Whether North Richland Hills revises its 14-year labour estimate, or the Texas Privacy Coalition narrows the request to search logs alone.
- Whether other courts follow the Oklahoma federal ruling that a warrantless Flock search was unconstitutional mass surveillance, with 404 Media counting more than 100,000 such searches a month.
- Whether the number of Texas agencies publishing search records in Flock's portals moves off 16.