Minnesota statute 13824 has been on the books for over a decade and was a result of two years of negotiations between law enforcement and a a broad group of stakeholders from across the political spectrum... the statute would prohibit the creation of a statewide repository of ALPR data. Two, the statute would only allow ALPR use related to active criminal investigations.

Are we putting intent first or are we simply implementing things like AI powered cameras in our communities because they're a shiny new tool. Let's take the time to articulate our intent and understand our limitations under the law.

What is emerging is a vast interconnected network of cameras on every intersection, every squad car, every officer, every drone that tracks everyone's movements all the time. Our city is looking less and less like a free society and more and more like an open air prison.

This is technology made for abuse. It's actually amazing just how many officers have been publicly caught and arrested abusing it to stalk people and act as predators themselves. Among the people victimized by flock cameras are constitutional observers and everyone who exercises their constitutional rights resisting ICE.

We have declared ourselves a sanctuary city and this winter we proved exactly how strongly we felt about sanctuary for our immigrant neighbors... It's well known that Flock and other AI powered mass surveillance systems are easily accessed by ICE for immigration enforcement... Essentially, we'll become a sanctuary city in name only if we use these systems.

Any machine that falls under the category of AI is not designed for accuracy. A camera with software that analyzes images for the police must compress that image into a numerical best guess of what it contains and then compare that best guess with other best guesses extracted from images of crime data... If your goal is to be able to point to something that is definitionally impossible to understand and avoid accountability by outsourcing your reasoning to a guessing machine, then yes, these AI machines are exactly what you're looking for. But if your goal is safety, true safety, then I must inform you that this is fundamentally not the solution, and it never will be.