MINNEAPOLIMEDIA EDITORIAL | Public Safety Must Not Become a Record of Everywhere We Go

St. Paul was right to remove its Flock cameras after learning that residents’ vehicle data could travel beyond the city’s control. License plate readers may help solve crimes, but no public safety system should quietly convert the ordinary movements of innocent people into information available across an expanding surveillance network.

SAINT PAUL, MN (August 28, 2026)  Most people driving through St. Paul are not fleeing a crime scene. They are going to work, taking children to school, visiting relatives, attending worship, keeping medical appointments, buying groceries or returning home.

Their license plates are visible in public. That does not mean the government should create a searchable history of their movements, retain it and make it accessible across a network most residents cannot see, examine or meaningfully challenge.

That distinction is at the center of St. Paul’s growing dispute over automated license plate readers operated through Flock Safety.

The St. Paul City Council voted 7-0 Wednesday for a resolution calling on the city and Ramsey County to end their use of Flock cameras. The resolution was nonbinding, meaning the council could express its position and demand accountability but could not order every camera within the city removed.

Mayor Kaohly Her and Police Chief Axel Henry nevertheless agreed to remove the two Flock cameras owned by the city. Their decision was appropriate. It recognized that public safety depends not only on the government’s ability to investigate crime, but also on the public’s confidence that investigative tools will remain within lawful and clearly understood boundaries.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office operates 11 additional Flock cameras inside St. Paul. Sheriff Bob Fletcher has defended them and said they will remain unless the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners directs otherwise. Fletcher described the technology as one of the most effective tools he has encountered during four decades in law enforcement. He said it has helped identify stolen vehicles, locate missing people and support investigations of serious crimes.

Those arguments deserve to be taken seriously. Carjackings, vehicle thefts, abductions and violent crimes are not abstractions. They leave real victims frightened, injured or grieving. When police possess a tool capable of locating a suspect’s vehicle quickly, elected officials must consider the consequences of taking that tool away.

Effectiveness Cannot Be the Only Standard

A technology can be useful and still be too intrusive. It can help solve crimes while collecting information about thousands of people who are suspected of nothing. It can operate within one department’s rules while remaining vulnerable to access by agencies that follow different rules. It can begin as a limited investigative tool and become a regional surveillance system without residents ever being asked whether that transformation is acceptable.

That is what makes the St. Paul controversy larger than 13 cameras.

Flock’s automated license plate readers capture images of passing vehicles and record plate numbers, dates, times, locations and surrounding visual information. Depending on the system and configuration, the technology can also identify characteristics such as vehicle make, model, color and distinguishing features.

A single image may reveal little. A collection of images gathered across multiple locations and searched over time can reveal much more. It can indicate where a person works, where a child attends school, which medical office someone visits, where a family worships, which political gathering a resident attended or whose home a person entered.

A license plate is not a name, but law enforcement can usually connect it to a registered owner. Once location, time and identity are combined, an ordinary traffic record begins to describe a life.

The Failure of Control in Interconnected Networks

The city’s decision followed revelations involving Operation Metro Surge, a multiagency federal enforcement operation that included immigration activity. A Minnesota Star Tribune investigation found that federal immigration authorities had a pathway to information collected through Minnesota’s Flock network even though state law restricts how automated license plate reader data may be shared.

Minnesota law classifies ALPR information as private or nonpublic data in most circumstances under Minnesota Statutes § 13.824. It limits collection, regulates retention and generally requires that access and sharing be connected to legitimate law enforcement purposes. Data unrelated to an active criminal investigation must ordinarily be destroyed within 60 days. The statute also restricts sharing and requires agencies using the technology to maintain public logs.

Those protections matter, but the Flock controversy exposed the weakness of rules that depend upon every participant in an interconnected system exercising the same care.

St. Paul could establish standards for its police department. It could audit its own personnel, limit access and instruct employees not to use the system for civil immigration enforcement. But once the city shared information with partner agencies, or participated in a network in which other agencies could request or obtain information, St. Paul’s ability to control what happened next became uncertain.

Council President Rebecca Noecker said the concern was not that St. Paul employees had been caught abusing the cameras. The concern was that data belonging to St. Paul residents had been shared with dozens of agencies, some of which did not follow the city’s standards and some of which allowed access that city officials had not anticipated.

That is not a minor administrative mistake. It is a failure of control at the point where surveillance becomes most dangerous. The public was effectively asked to trust St. Paul with information that St. Paul could not guarantee it would continue to control.

According to publicly available transparency information cited by the Star Tribune, St. Paul police had searched the license plate reader database 341 times during the 30 days preceding Wednesday’s vote. The department shared data with almost 60 Minnesota law enforcement agencies during that period.

Those numbers do not prove misconduct. They demonstrate scale.

Each additional agency, user and access point expands the number of decisions that must be made correctly. Every expansion increases the possibility of an improper search, an unauthorized disclosure, a mistaken match or use for a purpose never presented to residents when the cameras were installed.

Flock says its customers own and control their data, that sharing is not automatic and that agencies decide who receives access. The company has also announced additional safeguards, including shorter recommended retention periods, required case codes, stronger auditing and new restrictions intended to prevent misuse.

Those changes acknowledge the legitimacy of the concerns. They do not resolve the underlying question. If a city must rely on a private vendor’s changing settings, the judgment of dozens of outside agencies and a network of agreements residents cannot realistically monitor, then local control may exist more clearly on paper than in practice.

The Rise of Private Surveillance Networks

The problem becomes even more complicated because police departments are not the only customers purchasing Flock cameras. The company also sells systems to businesses, schools, neighborhood organizations and homeowners associations. Flock’s own policy materials state that private customers may choose to share their camera data with law enforcement.

A city can remove the cameras it owns and still remain covered by privately operated readers. If businesses or neighborhood associations send their information into police systems, a parallel surveillance network can develop beyond the procurement process and public accountability that apply to city equipment.

Private property owners have legitimate security concerns. A retailer may want evidence after a robbery. An apartment manager may want help identifying a vehicle involved in repeated thefts. A neighborhood may be frightened after a violent incident.

But the desire for security does not automatically settle what should happen to information collected about everyone who passes nearby. Residents should not have to discover after the fact that a camera installed by a business or association has contributed their movements to a law enforcement database. A private contract should not become a quiet route around democratic oversight.

Council members were therefore right to discuss an ordinance that would reach beyond the two city-owned cameras and establish clear rules for automated license plate readers operating within St. Paul. Such an ordinance must be written carefully, with public hearings, legal review and a precise understanding of city authority. It should address public and private systems, data retention, external sharing, auditing, notice requirements, access logs and consequences for violations.

Preserving the Purpose of Civic Privacy

The ordinance should also distinguish between a targeted investigative search and the continuous collection of information about everyone.

That distinction is essential. Police have long been able to observe a license plate on a public street. An officer investigating a specific crime may follow a lead, request records or seek judicial authorization when required. Flock changes the scale and duration of that observation. It allows a moment that once disappeared into ordinary life to be stored, compared and searched later.

When surveillance becomes automatic, inexpensive and interconnected, old assumptions about public observation are no longer adequate. A person may reasonably expect to be seen while driving through an intersection. That is different from expecting the government or a private company to remember the passage, attach a time and location to it and preserve the record for future investigation.

This issue should not be reduced to a choice between supporting police and supporting privacy. St. Paul needs effective law enforcement, and its officers need appropriate tools. Residents also need protection from systems capable of reconstructing their movements without suspicion, notice or meaningful consent. Both needs are real.

Law enforcement leaders sometimes respond that people who have done nothing wrong should not fear the cameras. That argument misunderstands the purpose of privacy.

Privacy is not a privilege reserved for people hiding misconduct. It protects the ordinary space in which people live without having to explain themselves. A woman visiting a domestic violence shelter has done nothing wrong. A patient arriving at a reproductive health clinic has done nothing wrong. A person attending a mosque, church or synagogue has done nothing wrong. A resident participating in a lawful protest has done nothing wrong. A worker visiting an immigration attorney has done nothing wrong.

The sensitivity of their movements does not disappear because a camera records only the vehicle.

Communities with histories of disproportionate policing have additional reasons for concern. Black residents, immigrants, Muslims, activists and low-income neighborhoods have repeatedly experienced surveillance presented as neutral but applied within unequal systems. Their caution should not be dismissed as hostility toward public safety. It is often grounded in memory.

The city also must consider the consequences of errors. License plates can be misread, cloned, stolen or attached to vehicles no longer driven by the registered owner. Databases can contain outdated information. An automated alert may begin a police encounter before an officer understands why the system identified the vehicle. A technology’s speed can be useful during a genuine emergency. It can also accelerate a mistake.

Required Steps for Ramsey County and the Minnesota Legislature

Sheriff Fletcher’s defense of the county’s cameras deserves a complete public response, not slogans. The Sheriff’s Office should identify cases in which Flock materially contributed to an arrest, the number of searches conducted, the number of false alerts encountered, how frequently outside agencies requested information, how many requests were denied, how audits were performed and what sanctions would follow an improper search.

The office should also explain, in writing, how it can guarantee that Ramsey County data will not reach federal immigration authorities through another agency or network function.

If the system is as indispensable and well controlled as the sheriff maintains, the evidence and safeguards should withstand public examination.

The Ramsey County Board should not defer entirely to the sheriff. County commissioners have an independent responsibility to consider privacy, civil rights, contracts, data governance and public trust. The 11 county-owned cameras inside St. Paul should not remain in operation indefinitely simply because the city lacks authority to remove them.

At minimum, the county should suspend network sharing while conducting an independent audit. That audit should examine every agency with access, every search connected to Operation Metro Surge, every onward disclosure and whether the system complied with Minnesota law and county policy.

The Minnesota Legislature also must act. A city-by-city response will produce a patchwork of protections while vehicle data continues to move across municipal and county boundaries. State law under § 13.824 should be updated to clearly regulate private ALPR networks, prohibit indirect access that would be unlawful if requested directly, require warrants for prolonged tracking, shorten retention periods and create meaningful penalties for misuse.

Every access point should leave an audit trail. Every search should require a documented criminal investigative purpose. Residents should have a process for learning whether their data were improperly accessed. Agencies should not evade Minnesota protections by routing requests through jurisdictions with weaker standards.

Conclusion

Public officials should remember that trust cannot be installed after the cameras go up. It must exist before the data are collected.

St. Paul’s unanimous vote was not a declaration that crime victims do not matter or that technology has no place in policing. It was an acknowledgment that the city could no longer assure residents that information collected in its name would remain governed by its promises.

Mayor Her and Chief Henry made the correct decision by agreeing to remove the city’s two cameras. Ramsey County should now confront the same evidence rather than treating resistance as an obstacle to law enforcement.

The burden is not on residents to prove that every camera has already been abused. The burden belongs to the government that wants to record innocent people and to the company profiting from the system. They must demonstrate that collection is necessary, narrowly limited, independently audited and genuinely under public control.

Until they can meet that burden, the cameras should not remain.

A safe city is not merely one in which police can find a vehicle after a crime. It is also one in which residents can move through their daily lives without wondering who is recording them, who can retrieve that record and where the information may travel next.

Public safety built by quietly monitoring everyone is not complete safety. It asks the public to surrender freedom now in exchange for assurances that powerful systems will behave properly later.

St. Paul residents have already learned that those assurances were not enough. The City Council listened. The mayor and police chief responded. Ramsey County and the Minnesota Legislature should do the same.

The cameras can come down. The work of protecting people must continue. This time, it must be done without treating every person on the road as information waiting to be searched.

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