Anchorage Assembly amends proposed police surveillance rules, then runs out of time

The Anchorage Assembly spent nearly two hours Tuesday night amending proposed rules for the city's police surveillance network, then ran out of time before a final vote. Members postponed it to Nov. 4.

The ordinance would, for the first time, write limits into city code for the Anchorage Police Department's Real Time Crime Center and its license plate readers. Under department policy, officers in the center can monitor public and private camera feeds, plate readers and drones during active incidents and investigations, Alaska News reported in September. The rules specific to it are now department policy, which the police chief can change without an Assembly vote. The mayor's version would keep most details in policy but require police to give the Assembly their policies and tell it within 30 days of material changes.

The first change members made was about warrants. Mayor Suzanne LaFrance's version of the ordinance bars city agencies from sharing surveillance data for purposes the rules otherwise forbid. It also limits police to sharing for law enforcement purposes and bars them from helping another jurisdiction enforce its laws against conduct that is legal in Alaska. Both rules have an exception: "unless required by law, warrant, or court order." The Assembly voted 12-0 to make that a "judicial warrant," one from a court. The municipal attorney's office, which supported the change, said it would rule out warrants issued by agencies such as the EPA.

The change does not require a warrant for routine sharing with other law enforcement agencies. Whether outside agencies should need one before police share data at all split the competing drafts, Alaska News reported Sept. 25.

Vice Chair Daniel Volland of North Anchorage said he did not think he could support the mayor's version without that change. He pointed to a federal ruling this month in Oklahoma, U.S. v. Kyle, in which a judge threw out evidence after finding that a warrantless search of about a month of a driver's stored plate-reader sightings violated the Fourth Amendment. Volland said he would likely go further, with an amendment requiring a judicial warrant before police search license plate reader records at all.

The Assembly did not get to it. The mayor's version would require annual counts of plate-reader "hits," alerts that match a plate to a criminal justice record, along with arrests tied to them and investigations using them. It does not require counting searches of stored plate data.

LaFrance urged members at the start of the meeting to pass her version, saying other versions and amendments "would effectively halt these joint operations" with state and federal agencies, including human trafficking investigations.

Members also made it easier for the Assembly to suspend a city agency's use of a surveillance tool until it finds a violation fixed. The mayor's version allowed a suspension if an agency "knowingly, materially, and consistently" broke the rules, or failed to fix a "knowing material" violation. Sydney Scout of North Anchorage said that wording "creates extremely large loopholes." The Assembly changed "and" to "or," so any one of the three would be enough, and dropped "knowing material" from the second trigger, 8-4. Kameron Perez-Verdia of West Anchorage and Jared Goecker of Chugiak-Eagle River argued the bar should stay high, and the municipal attorney's office said the power was meant not to be "super easy to use." Perez-Verdia's attempt to restore "knowing material" failed on a 6-6 tie.

The ordinance has been through at least two Assembly work sessions, and Tuesday's debate came down at times to single words. As members worked through "and" versus "or," Goecker asked, "How much time have we spent on this just to change the word to 'or'?" After the amendment passed, Brawley offered her own read on the night's tangle of amendments to amendments: "Maybe this is why we are not allowed to amend four things deep, because we would all get thoroughly confused."

The Assembly also took up, but did not finish, a proposal to write a 14-day limit on keeping surveillance data into code. The municipal attorney's office warned that a fixed number would mean passing a new ordinance to keep data even a day longer. Police Chief Sean Case said plate-reader data is deleted after 14 days unless it is tied to a case, but that he could see reasons to keep it longer, such as a missing-person case of public concern.

The meeting was set to end at 11 pm. A motion to run until 11:30 fell short of the eight votes it needed, so with minutes left, members voted 11-1 to postpone. Chair Anna Brawley said the Nov. 4 agenda is already crowded and the ordinance could slip later.