Call the special meeting of the St.

Paul City Council to order.

Roll call, please.

Johnson.

Here.

Joe St.

Kim.

Yang.

Here.

Bowie.

Here.

Coleman here.

Council President Naker.

Here.

Six present, one absent who is expected shortly.

Councilmember Kim.

There's one item.

Public hearing 26-16, public comment on police surveillance technology and data privacy.

Great.

So thank you, everyone, for joining us today for our public hearing.

We appreciate you being here, and we are looking forward to hearing your testimony.

A couple of housekeeping items again.

So we have about an hour and a half for this public hearing.

We are hoping to hear from as many people as we possibly can.

That means that we ask folks, especially if you are sure you want to speak, please get to the front of the line so we can make sure we hear from you.

If you hear something said that you a hundred percent agree with, you can say, I a hundred percent agree with something someone else said, and you don't have to repeat it verbatim.

That will ensure that someone else who really wants to speak and maybe has something different to say, has their chance.

So just don't want you to feel like this is the only way to make yourselves heard.

Um but again, we appreciate you being here.

And we don't want to cut into your time by leaving ourselves time to talk.

So just anticipating that in advance.

And we'll just have folks come alternating sides one at a time.

And then when you're done speaking, please sign in on the sign-in sheets.

So Minnesota Statute 13824 has been in the books for over a decade and was a result of two years of negotiations between law enforcement and a broad group of stakeholders from across the political spectrum.

And I was part of the uh final negotiations of the ALPR statute on behalf of Minnesotans for open government, a nonpartisan group on whose board I serve.

Now the resulting compromise that came out of the discussions turned on several key points, including uh one, that 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.

Three, law enforcement entities could only check ALPR images against the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's hot list of license plate numbers unless there was an ongoing criminal investigation that warranted additional checks.

And there's other important provisions in there, but those are three I'd like to touch on.

Now the statute was passed with the intention of comprehensively regulating ALPR use in our state.

So any law enforcement entity that uses ALPR cameras in the state of Minnesota has to comply with these and other requirements and statute.

And taking actions outside of those requirements violates Minnesota law.

I see that my time is short, so I'll turn you to my written comments, which detail how certain things like participating with Flock as a provider of data to Flock and taking data out of the Flock system, which is a national and statewide database of other ALPR data violates one of the provisions of the ALPR statute.

So uh you have in front of you political questions, uh you also have legal questions, such as if a flock contract violates state law, then it would not be able to be uh enforced.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Make sure to sign in.

And thank you for reminding me of something critical, which is that if you sent in email testimony, we have that in front of us in the public record, and we can review that.

So just know that it's you can always say, I'm running out of time, refer to my comments, or I'll email you.

Um thank you so much.

Please come on up.

Welcome.

Hello.

Uh my name's Chris Daniel.

Uh, I'm from Ward 1.

Uh so thank you for calling this hearing.

I really appreciate you uh taking the time out of your schedule listen, and thank you especially to Councilmember Bowie for sponsoring it.

Um as a technology professional since the early 2000s, I'd like to comment on the privacy implications of outsourcing any part of our community safety to private corporations.

Um throughout the past couple of decades, we have witnessed tech companies pushing the boundaries of established law in order to extract profit.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, all of these and more have abused their effective monopoly positions to protect and increase their profits.