The Middletown Public Safety Commission met on August 3, 2026, at 6:46 PM and adjourned at 8:22 PM. The meeting covered approval of previous minutes, public testimony on the proposed Flock drone system, a presentation and discussion of a revised Flock drone agreement, a one-way traffic proposal for Court Street, a crime statistics report, and other routine matters. The commission voted 4-1 (one abstention) to recommend the revised Flock drone master agreement to the Common Council.
Yes. Yes. And Judy. Judy. All right. We are recording the meeting. I'm going to call a meeting to order at 646. First item on the agenda is approval of the minutes from June 15th. Is our motion? Thank you, Tony. Is there a second? Kelly, thank you. All in favor? Hi. Okay, the minutes are approved. Thank you. Our next up is a public hearing. If anyone from the public would like to speak on any matter on the police agenda, please raise your hand and you can move forward to sit next to the chief at the table there so we can see you on WebEx. State your name, address, and you have five minutes to speak to any agenda item. So is there anyone who'd like to speak? Yeah, well, Consumman, I have a letter that was sent via Linda Reed. Is this the time that it would it's it's about public comment in regards to the flock cameras? Should I read that into the record that that's what the request of the Sunder is? We don't always do this at the ends of public comment chief. So if you go into the end. Okay, thank you. I think your guidance on it. Thank you. All right. So who would like to speak first? No, of course. Um my legal name is James uh Calabrese. Um and I live at 32 Grand Street, Middletown. Um six four five seven. And um, yeah, I'd like to speak about um Flock. So um Flock as a nationwide service um uh reads 20 billion uh license plates in America every month. 20 billion is a really big number. It's a lot bigger than the number of Americans there are. But when it comes to uh their success rate, uh their success rate is you know, they claim on the on their sites it's about 99%. So 99% sounds really good. It's like the number you'd kind of want if you have a surgery and you want to know if that surgery is gonna go well. But when it comes down to whether or not uh you know our data is being used correctly, uh that 1% actually really does add up and really does matter. Um so 1% of 20 billion is 200 million missed uh uh inputs, uh errors, uh clerical errors, uh, and the like. And so there's been numerous instances in the last uh eight months, 10 months of uh individuals getting their license plates uh tagged and pinged by the FBI when their license plate isn't uh isn't a stolen car, it isn't a vehicle that should be uh looked into. So the specific uh instance I'll just quickly try to summarize is uh a man in uh Minnesota uh had his car pinged. Uh there was a car in California, the FBI realized was um was a stolen car, and so they put out sort of a uh you know, like a search for it. The automatic license plate reader in Minnesota uh determined that this man's car uh was the exact match of this stolen car in California. Unfortunately for him, uh, you know, he was out doing errands and four you know, cops showed up with guns drawn. Umfortunately for him, you his car was just not the right car. It was just missing two uh two numbers, which would have made it identical to the car that had been stolen.