(The Center Square) – Spokane County can now expand its crime prevention camera program to more than two dozen locations after local officials greenlighted the initiative on Tuesday. The Board of County Commissioners amended itsagreementwith Flock Safety to authorize cameras at26street corners. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office already operates 39 Flock cameras around the jurisdiction, and the city of Spokane uses similar surveillance cameras. The Flock cameras detect license plates to identify specific vehicles, but not facial recognition for any particular person, gender or race. The county retains the data for 30 days and has detected over 750,000 cars in the last month alone, more than 950 of which were on a "hotlist." "If you turn around and hire deputies to go out and do it like we were doing before these," Cpl. Mark Gregory said Wednesday, "what would be the cost of that? … To run that many plates takes a lot of time, but the cameras are doing basically the same thing that a deputy would do." According to atransparency portal, the cameras reference data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify if a driver is wanted or operating a stolen vehicle. The program also checks for missing children and can broadcast Amber Alerts in the event of a kidnapping. Gregory said each camera costs around $3,000 annually after maintenance and about $750 to install. The Sheriff's Office currently has 12 cameras on hand that it can install at the 26 newly approved locations, expanding its presence alongside the other 39 cameras around the county. A deputy's salaryrangesfrom $72,000 in Spokane for entry-level positions to $105,000 for those with over 20 years of experience. Gregory said that the cameras provide a more efficient method of scanning plates, with grants funding all the cameras thus far, saving local tax dollars. "I wish we never had to use cameras. I wish I came in and the doors were locked, saying, 'There's no crime anymore, go home," Gregory told The Center Square. "I'd retire in a heartbeat, but we've literally caught sexual assault suspects [with these]; you name it, we've done it." Advocate Brennan McCurdy started apetitionlast month, urging the Spokane City Council to pause theinstallationof more cameras until it conducts a public hearing on the issue. The council approved the purchase of eight cameras in March and allowed for public comment. The county also held a public hearing on Tuesday before expanding its program, but no one showed up to testify for or against it. McCurdy argues that a camera tracks people's movement without a warrant, contrary to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Carpenter v. United States. Advocates inMemphisandAtlantahave reported that authorities installed surveillance cameras outside their homes. Gregory isn't aware of any complaints in Spokane but said that local policy would flag repeated searches for a specific vehicle if there were no corresponding investigations. The Center Square contacted McCurdy for comment but didn't receive an immediate response. "Even if you don't live in Spokane," McCurdy wrote in his petition, "if you pass through — even occasionally — your movements are still being tracked. This affects all of us."
