The facts
The city of North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth-area suburb, told privacy advocate Phil Mynona it would cost $2.3 million, all of it paid up front, to answer his public records request about how police use the city's Flock Safety cameras. The invoice priced the job at $15 an hour of labor, which the city said added up to more than 14 years of work to search about a terabyte of communications about errors, misuse and effectiveness of the system.
Mynona filed the request in late August on behalf of his anti-surveillance group, the Texas Privacy Coalition. He has sent nearly identical requests to almost 200 law enforcement agencies trying to learn how they use the devices. The city of Sealy, west of Houston, recently handed over more than 400,000 pages of documents for free. Mynona called the $2.3 million invoice "ludicrous". A North Richland Hills city spokesperson confirmed the invoice to the Texas Tribune but declined to answer questions.
The cameras log license plate numbers plus other identifying details, including make, model, bumper stickers and dents, and officers can search thousands of cameras owned by hundreds of police agencies in a single query. Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company behind them, releases few details about its cameras.
The secrecy is not theoretical. A Lufkin police officer was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to 100 felony counts of abusing official information for using Flock cameras to stalk several people. That case started with a public records request from USA Today, which prompted an investigation and an audit of the whole Lufkin department that flagged a second officer for potential misuse.
Here is the detail that detonates the invoice: the reporting notes that agencies' audit data of searches "is exportable through the click of a few buttons" on Flock's platform, and the company offers departments free transparency portals. Of the hundreds of Texas agencies using Flock cameras, only 59 use the portals, and only 16 share their search records. Other agencies are slamming the door too: the Department of Public Safety withheld records it had previously provided and asked the attorney general to let it keep them hidden, and the Texas Department of Transportation declined to share camera permit locations, citing public safety concerns.
Our take
North Richland Hills bought cameras that watch every car that moves, then priced the public's right to watch back at $2.3 million. That is not a fee schedule. That is a fuck-off with an invoice number. Fourteen years of labor at $15 an hour to search a single terabyte means the city employs either the slowest reader in Texas or the most honest liar in local government.
Because the same reporting says the audit data is exportable "through the click of a few buttons". A few buttons. Not fourteen years. A few buttons. So the invoice is not an estimate, it is a ransom note written by people who assume you have never touched a computer. They confirmed the invoice to the Tribune and then declined to answer questions, which is the bureaucratic version of hanging up on you.
And we know exactly what they are afraid you will find, because the last time these records got out, they caught a Lufkin cop using the cameras to stalk people, and he just drew five years after pleading to 100 felonies. The records did not just embarrass one department. They triggered an audit that flagged a second officer. Small wonder the going rate for curiosity is $2.3 million.
The punchline is Greg Abbott. When the governor of Texas, a man who has never met a surveillance camera he wanted to point away from people, starts a "crackdown", blocks the funding and pauses installations, the grift got too obvious even for the home team. North Richland Hills will watch your car for free. Watching them back costs $2.3 million. That is not transparency. That is a cover charge.
