The Public Safety Committee of the Manitowoc Common Council met on Monday, September 14, 2026, at 5:30 PM in Council Chambers at City Hall, with remote participation available via Zoom. The agenda included the consent calendar, a request for new sidewalks on South 21st Street and Flambeau Street, and public testimony urging the committee to recommend terminating the city's contract with Flock Safety surveillance cameras. The committee approved the August minutes, discussed the sidewalk request at length, and deferred the item pending additional information. The Flock Safety topic was not on the agenda, so the committee could not deliberate on it, but the chair indicated it would be scheduled for a future meeting.
So you work with the Chiefs. It is 5:30, and I will call the public safety committee meeting to order for September. Call to order, rule call. We have everybody present except for uh Alderman Beaman. He's not on the uh Zoom, is he? I will uh he contacted me earlier, so we should mark him excused as opposed to absent. I'm going to now open the meeting up to public comment. If there's somebody from the public that would uh wishes to speak on an item, uh is your time to do so. Once again, uh opened up for public input. Is there somebody from the public that wishes to speak? If you if you sir, yeah, if you would come up to the front uh and sit by one of the mics where the little green thing is on, if you would uh please list your name and your address for the record. Thank you. Uh my name is Michael Pearson, and my address is 713 Northwater Street, uh, Manitowak, Wisconsin. So, members of the committee, thank you for allowing me to speak tonight. I want to begin by making something very clear. I'm not against law enforcement, I'm not against technology, and I'm certainly not against finding better ways to keep our community safe. I am here because I believe there is a line that our city should not cross in the name of public safety, one that more than likely leads to a permanent surveillance state, and that puts and that once put up is nearly impossible to tear down. I believe the Manitowoc Police Department and public have the opportunity in the coming weeks and months to come to an agreement on just where that line is and to decide if we are comfortable with crossing that line. Tonight I am firmly asking you, the public safety committee to send a recommendation to common council to not only officially terminate the city's contract with Flock Safety, but immediately discontinue the use of the cameras. Um recommend that the city will not simply replace Flock with another company selling a similar surveillance model. Because the problem isn't just Flock, the problem isn't even the cameras. The problem is the enormous database and questionable encryption, the ability to search and share that database with little to no oversight, the AI integration that is only an update away from other recognition capabilities, and the new sensor-based detection technologies that these surveillance companies are now beginning to roll out. And I think this is where we need to stop pretending that we are simply talking about cameras. But Axon is also developing much broader technology ecosystem. Its fusis platform is designed to bring together over 85 million public and private camera feeds, body cameras, drones, license plate readers, gunshot detection, AI models, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi sensors, and other data feeds into a single operational interface. Axon already has existing relationships with police departments and is in line to replace Flock in some jurisdictions, including in Wisconsin. They have a product called Falcon Net. Essentially a cell phone tower and a police cruiser. In use, it causes all phones in the area to disconnect from traditional cell towers and become intercepted by its own tower, gaining access to IMEI, geolocation, metadata, and all unencrypted central traffic occurring on any phone within its range. These companies that started with just cameras that read license plates have quickly escalated into sensor drag nets that capture your digital fingerprint and deploy mobile systems capable of intercepting all cellular activity in a given area. And these technologies don't exist in completely separate worlds. The direction of this industry is towards connecting more cameras, more sensors, more data, and more artificial intelligence into increasingly comprehensive surveillance systems. Flock, axon, and cognite, and many more, these companies are all mass surveillance companies, and they are publicly telling us what they are building. And I think that is exactly why I don't want you to make the mistake of simply thinking this is a decision about Flock. Because if we officially cancel Flock and turn around and purchase another company's version of essentially the same surveillance infrastructure, then we really haven't resolved the problem. And I think one of the things that we have lost sight of is the Fourth Amendment. Warrants are supposed to create friction between the government and the information it wants to obtain. The friction is intentional. It is part of the checks and balances of the different government branches. Technology like this is intentionally designed to remove that friction. So I guess one of the things I also would like to ask is what has Flock done and what has our investment got us here in Manitowoc. Is literally to eliminate crime. So how many murders has Flock to help solve in Manitowk? How many shootings? How many missing children? How many stolen vehicles? How many serious crimes has it actually helped to solve? I'm not asking what the technology could do or the promises the company has made. I'm asking what Flock has actually done. Well, I do not advocate for any of this at all.