How Portsmouth councilors voted after comments against Mount Hope Bridge license plate readers

PORTSMOUTH – The Town Council voted unanimously Monday night to rescind its approval for a one-year pilot program which would have entailed the installation of automated license plate reading cameras at the southern end of the Mount Hope Bridge on Boyd’s Lane and Bristol Ferry road.

While the Town Council initially approved in a 6-1 vote on June 13 the Portsmouth Police Department’s request to collaborate with the Bristol Police Department on a suicide prevention program utilizing Flock Safety ALPR cameras, Councilmember Len Katzman opened Monday’s discussion of the issue with a motion to rescind that approval based on concerns about surveillance, civil liberties and data security expressed to him by numerous town residents in the wake of the June vote.

Previously: Portsmouth to reconsider ALPR camera program as suicide prevention advocates speak out

Katzman, who voted in favor of the program the first time around, followed his motion with some remarks elucidating his change of heart: “Good government means changing one’s opinion when one learns further information…at present, I feel that the privacy concerns outweigh the purported safety advantages to these [cameras] if there are any – and I actually question whether there are at this point.”

Katzman also made a point to thank Portsmouth Police Chief Brian Peters for proactively seeking solutions to keep Portsmouth safe, saying, “I place no fault on Chief Peters or our police department or Bristol police or any of the organizations that stepped up to fund it. I think they all came from a place of suicide prevention and doing good deeds as did we when we voted on June 13.”

Several residents, including Jack McDaid, Larry Fitzmorris, of Portsmouth Concerned Citizens, Faye Dion (who is also an RI ACLU board member), and others spoke against the program for various reasons, including concerns about the potential for data to be misused and the erosion of civil liberties in the absence of a town ordinance controlling the use of the cameras.

Past coverage: Measure to prevent suicides from Mount Hope Bridge draws concerns from ACLU. Here's why.

Many of them also took time to express support for suicide prevention efforts, and several including McDaid specifically named the solution of physical barriers on the bridges, long championed by a local advocacy group called Bridging the Gap, as a more effective solution because it prevents people from jumping off the bridge without putting other citizens’ privacy at risk.

Sal Carceller, whose family escaped to the United States from Spain’s Franco dictatorship when he was a child in the 1960s, built a life for himself in Portsmouth through a career working in data collection and security. In his testimony opposing the cameras, Carceller voiced his concern about data stored and controlled by Flock rather than by the town, and said, “The bottom line is, as a law-abiding citizen, as an American citizen – which I am proud to be – I do not like the idea of any system tracking my whereabouts.”

In response to the Council’s 7-0 vote to rescind its approval for the program, RI ACLU Policy Associate Hannah Stern issued a statement to “sincerely thank the members of the Council for reopening the issue, for recognizing the harmful implications of this expansive surveillance technology, and for putting the civil liberties of their residents at the forefront of their decision.”

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The ACLU, which had previously written a letter to the Cranston City Council in 2021 expressing opposition to the installation of Flock cameras in that city for crime prevention purposes, wrote a new letter to the Portsmouth Town Council for Monday’s meeting.

The letter voiced specific opposition to the proposed use of the cameras in Portsmouth and expressed, over the course of nearly eight pages, a litany of concerns about both the broad surveillance capabilities of the technology and the lack of codified oversight at either the municipal or state level to tightly control its use. While the ACLU is principally opposed to the use of ALPR cameras, it did advise some specific legal safeguards should the town choose to move forward with the program:

“If the Town is serious in wanting to implement a surveillance technology like this while protecting the rights of its residents, it should adopt an ordinance that codifies the protections and remedies that are deficient in, and missing from, this policy, many of which we have outlined in this detailed testimony. An ordinance could include specific protections similar to those contained within 22 – H 7507 and 22 – S 2650, legislation that was introduced in the Rhode Island legislature this year to address this technology.”

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Peters, like many of the council members and other meeting attendees, did not have a chance to review the new letter prior to the meeting. However, pointed out that the RI ACLU had previously praised the Portsmouth Police Department’s efforts at transparency in designing its ALPR program and policy, and he offered some possible revisions to the program, such as deleting data captured by the cameras after only 10 days, rather than 30. Peters said, “I still believe this pilot program has merits. This is a program that I believe can use technology to help us help other people.”

John Patton, co-founder, treasurer and secretary of The Matthew Patton Foundation, also spoke in favor of the pilot program. The Patton Foundation, which focuses on mental health needs and suicide prevention for veterans and active servicemembers, had offered to donate funding for the suicide prevention pilot program alongside the East Bay Community Action Program after being approached by the Bristol Police Department through the Bristol Health Equity Zone, where all three organizations regularly meet to discuss mental health and suicide prevention efforts in the East Bay.

Patton acknowledged that barriers would most effectively prevent suicide attempts off the Mount Hope Bridge, but expressed his strong support for the pilot program within the context of his strong support for any sort of preventative measure which could save lives in the interim as the campaign for barriers wends its way through the slow and difficult legislative process.

Their testimony was supported by Laura Ann Holland, a “community engagement manager” for Flock Safety who has been with the company for about three months. Holland clarified that the company stores its data using a double-encryption system on the AWS cloud service. She also mentioned that “assuming best intentions” was one of Flock’s company values, and asked Portsmouth to extend the generosity of that assumption to Flock.

Council Vice President Linda Ujifusa keyed in on that phrase, thanking the residents of Portsmouth for their “impressive testimony” against the cameras and stating that the testimony from Flock Safety was much less impressive specifically because of its lack of evidence-based argument and reliance on a request of the town to make an assumption about a vendor’s intentions.

Councilmen Keith Hamilton, J. Mark Ryan and Kevin Aguiar also spoke in favor of rescinding approval, although all expressed openness to reconsidering a pilot program with considerably tightened controls on some of the privacy and data concerns, possibly by means of a town ordinance written in consultation with the town of Bristol. Councilwoman Daniela Abbot, the only member of the council who opposed the program from the outset, thanked her colleagues for reconsidering the issue with open minds before joining them in a unanimous vote rescinding approval for the program.

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Portsmouth Town Council rescinds vote for cameras on Mount Hope Bridge