Anchorage Assembly: Worksession re AM 524-2026, Real Time Crime Center

Okay everyone, let's get started. Um, this is our first work session of the day. Uh, today is Friday, August 21st. We are noticed from 10:40 to 11:40 AM and have a couple things after this. This is a work session on, uh, broadly on Real Time Crime Center, uh, with APD, and more specifically AM524-2026, um, a cooperative purchase from Thundercat Technology, etc., for some equipment for said Real-time Crime Center, which was postponed from our August 4th and August 18th meetings, will be on our agenda for September 1st.

So we'll do introductions, and then I'll say that my intent is to mainly turn this over to Chief Case to give a presentation, and then I will be managing the queue. So starting with members, Mr. Martinez, George Martinez, Cameron Perez, Verdell, Donald Handlin, Sheriff Gerker, Sydney Scout, Anna Brawley. And on the phone we have Ms. Silvers.

Here. And any other members on the phone?

Okay, not hearing any. We're also joined by members of the administration, members of the public, clerk, assembly council, and legislative services, and Chief Case. So I will again turn it over. We have a presentation today, and go ahead, Chief Case. All right, thank you everyone.

Thank you, ma'am. I want to start by just backing us up to a little over 2 years ago when we started talking about technology at the Anchorage Police Department. We, we did not hesitate for one second to talk about our goal was to be the most technologically advanced police department in the country. There's a host of reasons for that, one of which is even being fully staffed, if we had all of our officers on the street, The expectations, demands that we all have to include the police department of how we police this community and how the Anchorage Police Department is involved in this community, 415 officers isn't, isn't touching it. Uh, there has to be ways that we interact, engage with the community, and provide services outside of straight law enforcement services, uh, that, uh, that, that uses something so that we can use the 415 people when we are fully staffed.

And technology is, is one of those pieces.

Where we're at today in that adventure, and I think it's really important that we understand the police department's direction. When we look at technology, we have a document that we follow internally. There are some guiding principles on how we implement, how we look at technology, how we test technology. Think of it as like the values that we keep when we're looking at bringing technology into the organization. Uh, we are the Anchorage Police Department.

Your Anchorage Police Department is a leader when it comes to technology in this country. We are not following behind other agencies and blindly buying technology and utilizing it. Currently this week, we have one of our deputy chiefs that's presenting at a real-time crime center conference. He's going to come home for 2 days and he's going to go out to another technology conference. And why is he doing that?

Because the work that the Anchorage Police Department is leading this country right now. There are police departments and technology companies right now that's working with APD and watching what we're doing. And they're making determinations and they're making policies based on some of the things that we're doing. So we're getting ahead of the, getting ahead of the program. And I tell you that, so number one, I think it's something that we can be proud of.

Number two, You have a great resource at your hand with people inside of the Anchorage Police Department that knows a whole heck of a lot of not only what's going on within the police department, but can tell you a whole heck of a lot what's going on around the country in law enforcement in general, how we use policing, or how we use technology.

You have all seen this, but I will always start off presentations like this. I mentioned that we have a document that we utilize when we look at new technology, And technology is an extension of everything else we do. And we are a vision and values-based organization. This is what we follow in everything that we do. Unfortunately, as great as artificial intelligence technology is, exists today, I tried, doesn't work.

I can't type into AI right now and ask it, how many times have I said publicly the right to privacy? Because I've said it probably more than anybody else publicly. Uh, in the last 2 and a half years, it has been a fundamental focus of what we do and how we do it when it comes to technology.

Many of you seen this slide as well, but again, it is important that we look at the full spectrum of things that we do here at the Anchorage Police Department. Everything that you see in red there are things that we added in the last just over 2 years. There are 3 additional, uh, items that I've placed on there in yellow. Uh, one, the street enforcement team, that is the street drug units that we've been talking about. Uh, special problems unit, that is, uh, those kind of average everyday really annoying things that we want the police department to do something about.

Uh, that kind of, we just, we try to hand it off to patrol, we try to hand it off to IMPACT, we try to hand it off to various different units. There's There's got to be a landing pad for those types of calls that we know are important to our community, but they don't have a landing pad. And then a dedicated foot patrol that right now, as you all know, are running by overtime. Uh, and, and what I can tell you is that the goal was to have these things online in October. Uh, that's just not going to be possible.

The, the requests and the demands of what we're being asked to do, we really can't move into that quite yet. And, you know, just to kind of further emphasize that there's, there's got to be some level of flexibility in technology that we can pass some of the work off to so that we have— are able to more quickly manage data and information, you know, things that right now we have individual employees doing some of that work.

Let's start with privacy. We know that we have a constitutional protection to privacy. What that means, and I think the public generally doesn't really understand what that means, we recite what that what Article 1, Section 22 of the Alaska Constitution is. What that means is, from a law enforcement perspective, the search and seizure rules that we have to follow here in the state of Alaska is different from virtually every other state in the country. Uh, we have significant rules, court rules, court rulings that dictate how we can implement search and seizure tools or how we go through search and seizure.

Use of force also falls under seizure, so that falls under the same Fourth Amendment or search and seizure, uh, criminal guidelines. And we have significant rules that we have to follow. For example, uh, something that you don't see in most areas of the country: when we stop a vehicle and we have probable cause to believe that there's some item in there that's illegal to have, virtually every place in the country we get to search that vehicle and send the occupier, the owner, on their way if we don't find anything. Or continue the investigation of the arrest. The city of Alaska, we don't do that.

Starting my career in California, it was a little weird that as soon as I had probable cause to search a vehicle and get, let's say, drugs out of a vehicle, uh, we tell the owner to walk away, we impound their car, we get a search warrant, and we search their vehicle because we have the right to privacy. That is a search and seizure requirement that we have within the state of Alaska that we don't have in other, other states. So when we talk about the right to privacy, particularly as it relates to technology, we have to understand there's evidentiary rules that we have to follow. We can't violate the right to privacy. We can't violate search and seizure rules in the state of Alaska and walk into a court and have the judges go, yeah, we're okay with that.

Uh, that, that evidence won't be allowed. And in fact, in today's time frame, uh, which has really been a changing landscape over the last really 18 to 24 months, when officers have evidence that's suppressed, particularly in the search and seizure realm, we are starting to see the courts make decisions, and, uh, that affects the prosecutors and defense attorneys, that those cases and decisions that were made in those cases, testimony that were given in those cases where evidence was suppressed, now gets used towards the credibility of the officer in the future. 2 Years ago, we didn't see that in the state of Alaska at all. So there's layers upon layers of consequences for, uh, officers violating the right to privacy, or what we really refer to as search and seizure, Fourth Amendment issues, uh, here in the state of Alaska.

I apologize, the map on the right is a little bit light— or a little dark, rather— but those are 9 flock safety cameras plotted on a map in Anchorage. On the left is a New York Times article that came out earlier this month that says that Alaska is the only state in the country that does not have flock safety cameras. So you can choose which one you want to believe. You can punch in your address in a map that we can get on the internet, and you can believe what you see there. You can believe the New York Times.

What I can tell you is that I'm not aware of any governmental flock safety cameras in the state of Alaska, regardless of what either one of those two sources up there say. I'll talk a little bit about flock safety and the difference between those cameras and the cameras that we have access to. But, uh, you know, we set up these work sessions and we communicate with the public in various different ways, and I think one thing that's really important is we don't want to put information out that's not verifiable. Um, I can't lie to you. I, I can't come to you and tell you a lie and, and not have that impact my ability to, to be a badge-carrying member of this public.

Uh, and so you want to know the answers to things like this, I'm more than happy to give you what the answer is. And if I can't, I'll tell you why I can't give you the answer. So right now we don't have flock safety cameras in the state of Alaska. Thanks. And I'll just briefly note, we were joined, uh, by Mr. McCormick at 10:51 and on the phone, and Miss Baldwin-Day at 10:53, and I just— one quick clarifying question there since on this topic is, so I'm going to basically restate what you said, but are we utilizing any products?

Do we have contracts or subcontracts, or is there any financial relationship between the municipality and the company Flock? No, ma'am. Okay. And as you said, state troopers, other local agencies, you're not aware of any agencies in the state of Alaska that have installed Flock cameras or have a contractual relationship? WIFLOC.

That is correct. Okay, thanks. I got a question. Okay, uh, yeah, uh, yeah, Mr. Handlin, then Ms. Scout.

Yeah, just a quick question. So what is the source of the map? Because I've seen that, I guess, on social media, just the, the clipping there without any kind of information to verify, I guess. Where does— is that picture coming from? That's the DFLOC.

So if you type in DFLOC in a Google search, it'll pull up a website. Uh, it will show you— you can type in your city, your zip code. Uh, there's also a whole bunch of information that's on that particular website, but that's That's the website that came from.

Thanks. And we're also joined in the room by Ms. Park just now. Ms. Scout.

Would it be possible for you to describe the difference between Axon and Flock? Axon is what we have, like what we're actually talking about here, right? Yes, ma'am. And if that's part of your presentation, we can get to it. Yeah, next slide.

Okay, thank you.

These currently are the, um, video— videos that are available to the Anchorage Police Department pre-2025. So you've got traffic cameras that are up at the top, uh, so that we're all on the same sheet of music. The traffic cameras in Anchorage are not Anchorage Police Department cameras. Those belong to the traffic department. Those cameras are put up and designed to monitor traffic.

Over the course of years, those cameras have been important to the police department in investigating— started with traffic collisions and then expanded over time to crimes that have happened in and around intersections. Those cameras, uh, they are not of the quality and have the ability to draw high-quality resolution based on the infrastructure that we have here. To do things like zoom in and tell what color, what eye color Mr. Martinez has while he's driving down the road. We simply just don't have the resolution to do that. We don't have the infrastructure to pull that high-resolution data.

So that is simply a camera that exists out there. We can access that camera, we can access that camera quasi-real-time. We have to go to an individual camera. So if we say right out at the intersection outside of City Hall, there's a crime happening right now. Uh, we have the ability to tap into that camera as it's feeding right now and watch that camera, and then we can back that up a little bit if that is in fact where the crime happens.

And then we'll capture that data, we'll pull it out of that system, and we'll dump it into our evidence, uh, system to retain that for the crime that was occurring, uh, at the time. This is pre-2025. This is not Real Time Crime Center stuff. This is a bit something we had the ability to do prior to that. Ma'am, you mentioned flock safety.

The majority of the cameras that are flock safety are cameras a little bit different than the one there that is on the screen. Uh, their cameras are taking video footage and they're recording license plate information. So when you look at what a flock safety camera is doing, it's going to— it's doing two things at the same time. It's running a license plate, and I'll show you what that looks like on our cameras here in a minute, but it's also capturing the video that goes along with that. So, uh, and they're in fixed locations generally.

So every time you go through an intersection or down a road that has a fixed camera that's LPR enabled, you need to understand that it's high-resolution video as well as it's reading license plates, and it's capturing those two things together in what's is referred to as license plate reader, ALPR data. Uh, we don't have any fixed ALPR readers. I'm going to say the state of Alaska because as of weeks ago we didn't, uh, so I'm so fairly confident with that. Uh, certainly the Anchorage Police Department doesn't have any fixed location, uh, and we did that for a whole host of reasons. Uh, primarily our entire Real Time Crime Center system is built on the basis of— it's just that it's all real-time stuff.

When we drafted our policies, which I'll touch on just very briefly at the end, because you all heard it and it's the least boring or least exciting part of this presentation, uh, that was prior to Flock Safety having issues that became nationally known. I am not— I'm not confident enough to tell you we had the most restrictive policy, but I will tell you that we had one of the most restrictive policies when it comes to retention, security, and privacy measures when we drafted those policies. And again, that predates what happened with LockSafety. Jurisdictions that we traditionally think, and they were in some of the presentations at the time that I did, that have very, very restrictive policies that come to license plate readers specifically, but data that's housed in the Real Time Crime Center far exceeds what our policy is. So our perspective at the very beginning was we want real-time information for real-time crimes.

It's about safety to the public in the community, and it's about privacy of, of the community members. Uh, so hopefully that answered your question about least flock. I'll get to our cameras here in just a minute. Uh, upper right-hand corner and lower left-hand corner, those are two Axon cameras. The lower left is our, uh, dash cameras.

Upper right-hand corner are body-worn cameras. Uh, those cameras that, uh, are collecting data and those are running all the time. They don't collect audio all the time, but if an officer doesn't activate either one of those two devices, we can go back in time for a certain period of time and collect the video footage. We can't collect the audio footage, um, and, and that's very specific that we made that decision not to collect audio going back in time, specifically for privacy issues. So again, focusing on balancing that need for that information, and I can assure you there are many incidents that come up that people would love for us to have audio on those video feeds.

But again, we, we got to put the layer of privacy over everything that we do. We don't currently have, nor did we have in 2025, the ability to look up anyone's name or person in either of those two video feeds and say, find me the last time that person X you know, pass through an intersection, or we can't, we can't search for people in any of those data feeds or video feeds. In the lower right-hand corner, you have a Ring camera. I'll kind of cobble Ring cameras along with business cameras. We have always had the ability to get access to business videos, to Ring cameras, to private, uh, security cameras.

We've always had that ability. The process is that we would go to your home and we would say, we think you have information, or you would call us to your home and say something did happen and I have video, we would provide you a link in an email that you would click and you would drag and drop your video footage right into that link. That would secure it in our evidence storage, um, electronic evidence storage. So those are all the pre-2025 pieces of technology. Um, this is what relates to kind of a lot of the Real Time Crime Center as as we've talked about previously in this setting and in assembly meeting settings, I'm certainly leaving out a whole host of data and equipment and investigative tools that the police department has access to for decades on how they conduct investigations, really focusing on the things that have been kind of an issue and have been brought up by this particular body over the last couple of months.

I'm going to give you two quick case studies. Currently today, we get calls on a more often basis than we would like where somebody's loved one has threatened suicide by means. So it's, it's a threat where I am going to self-harm with the instrument they say they're going to self-harm with by cell phone, text, phone call, social media post and their loved one can't find them. They have no starting point, they have no place for us to go. And, uh, we currently have tools that are available that we can find where they're at and try to find those folks and bring them back safely to their loved ones.

Um, that is nothing new with the Real Time Crime Center. That is nothing new with any technology that was purchased in the last, uh, 2 years. That's technology we've been using for 15 to 20 years. And I think, I think it's important as we talk about Real Time Crime Center that we understand the investigative ability that the police department has had access to for years and years. And because we add the layer of Real Time Crime Center or AI or license plate readers, that we think about those things, that doesn't open up the door to, um, all of this technology that we haven't had, uh, access to for years and years.

The things that we're presenting, the pictures on the screen in the last slide, in the next slide here, those are the pieces of technology that are impacted by the Real Time Crime Center. On the right-hand side, uh, sexual assault, a recent sexual assault investigation, and we get this very, very frequently where there's not enough information about the individual that committed the crime. And there's a very rough location where it happened and a vehicle description that's not excellent, and that's what we got to go on. And that's not a great case to go on from good old, old-fashioned police work. And based on that information, we were able to go to the areas of town where the incident was believed to occur and start looking at intersection cameras.

Intersection cameras lead us to not the license plate, not the people— our cameras can't do that. And this is today, this is last week, uh, put information out to the department about a vehicle that we believe may be involved. Lo and behold, an officer has a piece of information and it starts unwinding, where then we get to implement technology and we get to determine the GPS coordinates of where this individual was. Not only to determine who he was, where he was, where the incident occurred, but also a robbery that was committed during the time. Effectively, the use of technology took a sexual assault case that's impossible to solve without the use of technology and not only brought that, uh, to a realistic case that we can prosecute, but also a robbery that was completely unrelated.

That's happening now. That's nothing to do with any technology we bought. So And I'm gonna kind of keep saying that because I think it's really important that we understand that the vote that we're taking in a week and a couple days for the roughly $600,000, we're not buying any new technology. My last slide, I'll give you a picture of what we're actually purchasing, just to kind of put that in context. Today, what we have available to us, post-2025, we've added a license plate reader up the top.

That's not ours. I will give you a picture of what ours looks like here in just a second. We have all the same stuff available to us. We've changed the way a little bit, the process to which we access that information and that data. So the first thing is you can go to a website that we created where you can register your camera.

Currently we have 236 cameras that are registered, and what that means, instead of me coming to your home and saying, I think you may have some information, or your business, that that may be on one of your video cameras. Is that true? We can simply electronically do that all without having to wake you up, without having to come to your door. That's the 236 cameras. We don't have access to those cameras.

We can't look at those cameras. We simply can do that all electronically by knowing that you have cameras and saying, hey, can you take a look? And here's that link that we would have sent you before. Drop that footage right in that link. The 11 cameras that have been that are, that are cameras that we have access, because you can also give us access to cameras, not through the website, but you can sign up to do it.

Those 11 cameras that are up there are all APD-owned cameras. We haven't taken any of those from the public yet. We're not receiving any live data in video stream from the public. But how that will work is once they are registered, they would have what's called a core for Fusys. They're going to plug their technology into that.

That is their Fusys core. They control everything that goes in and out of that core. They can share with us all the information they want. They can share nothing with us. They can share upon request.

They really have controls over what information we can get. What that core allows us to do is if they say, hey, I want you to take a look at this video, we could actually look directly at that video without them dropping that into that, uh, that website, uh, that, that link that we'd give them. So, uh, think if you have a business in your area that says, hey, I want to give you limited access to our exterior cameras outside of our business during certain hours of the day, uh, so if something's happening there, you can immediately pull them up. They could do that through the Fuses Core. Now Not in my lifetime or anyone's here are we going to be monitoring those cameras.

And that's something we have to be very clear to the businesses. If you ever give us access to your cameras, nobody's watching those things live. We're just never going to have the staffing to do that. So that's not the design here. And that, that works both ways.

Like I said, that is something we tell the businesses, don't let that be your expectation because we will never fulfill that expectation. That also goes the inverse. If there's a fear of the public that we're going to be live activating and monitoring all these cameras around town. It's just, it's not possible. Um, so however way you want to look at that, so that's available to us right now.

That was not available to us over a year ago. That is part of the contract that was approved, and part of the money that was paid for is bringing all of those cameras together. Now, why do we care about that? Think about our traffic cameras right now, and I don't want to go down to the road, too far down the road of how we would integrate our traffic cameras, but let's use that as an example. If, for example, every one of our traffic cameras was plugged into a FUSIS core, what that would mean is instead of an officer that's working in the Real Time Crime Center saying that, uh, at 4th and D, a crime is happening right now, they pull up that one camera.

And when they pull up that camera, they, they can pull up that single individual camera, and if they see that person running, they then have to go to the next camera, open up that camera, Currently, they can't have too many of those cameras opening because of the way the system is designed currently on a copper system. So you're gonna have to shut down some of those cameras so they can open additional cameras to see where the person's running. What this technology allows us to do is pull up multiple camera feeds at the same time and to be able, without an officer opening each one of those windows, open up those cameras at the same time so they can now watch that person and put information out on the radio. That the suspect in the crime is running westbound 4th Avenue and kind of give updates. Uh, it's a much more efficient process, um, but it doesn't change drastically what we're doing.

Efficiency— it makes it more of a real-time, uh, solution. We already technically have the capabilities to do that, and we do do that currently.

Member Scout, we're going back to license plate readers. This is our current license plate reader system. Uh, so when an officer gets a hit, uh, this is the screen that they get. And you can see that license plate looks just beautiful— can't read it. That's common.

The system itself will put what it believes is a license plate below it, and the officer has to verify that the license plate is what they're looking at and that the state's correct, because we obviously know we share some neighbor states that Uh, we can get confused if we don't pay attention whether or not it's Alaska plate. You see the green box at the upper right-hand corner? That green box is in the front license plate of the vehicle. That's the vehicle it's reading. This is reading a license plate.

This is not taking video footage within the ALPR data system. If we go back and pull up this record, there's not a video that goes along with it. This is what we get: the car, uh, the license plate, and then there's attached GPS data coordinates. That data exists for 14 days in our system right now. Uh, after that 14-day window, you can never go back and recover that information again.

Uh, there is roughly 10 individuals, uh, within the police department that have the ability to look into that historical data, but our officers on the street, this is what they get, uh, and this is what they have access to right now. Currently We will get a hit on a license plate if the license plate is registered in the national database for being a stolen vehicle, and we will get a hit on a license plate that we specifically put in for a specific reason. We've used— we've used this system for a critical missing. We've used this system for a Silver Alert. We've used this system for a couple violent crimes.

Uh, we have had one case in 2026 where we have released any information and data in our license plate reader system to any outside agency. That was for a felony crime that the— that a federal agency had been trying to find this person for well over a year, uh, a violent felony crime. And, uh, we helped them out with the location. Uh, we have extremely strict scrutiny on when we allow any of our information to get out. We do not access— let anyone access our data.

They can't get into it and search themselves. We provide them with the data they're asking for, um, not access to the system. None of our operators that operate in the Real Time Crime Center can do this without, uh, the commander of the Real Time Crime Center approving that being done first. Thanks. Uh, for Solna, we were joined in the room by Miss Silvers at 10:57.

I have a clarifying question. Can you unpack a little bit what you mean by a hit? So, so for example, is that an officer driving into what looks like a parking garage and it is picking up the data proactively, or is it that that just hypothetically, is that particular car something that the officer clicked on and said, I want to see that license plate? Like the, can you describe a hit and then basically walk us through a scenario in which, like, at what point is the choice being made? Yes.

And is it being made by the human or the technology? Yes, ma'am. That's training environment. That's our parking garage. So, uh, That's where that's occurring.

So when you're out in the field, the license plate rear cameras are— any license plate it can read, it's going to run against that database, the National Stolen Vehicle Database, and then what we put in the, the database that we have internally that it will read off of, the plates that we want it to activate on. The officers aren't getting any notification or activation within their vehicle when license plates are being read. They get a notification by an alarm in the car when the license plate reader reads a license plate and it, it matches to what's in a database. And that's why— then that's why the screen pops up. That's where the human becomes involved, where the human has to verify, first of all, is that the plate that we're even looking at?

And, and I gave you a nice messed up plate there. You can see, uh, just as an example that the officer's first got to go through, like, is the plate even the match? Once that's done, they switch to a different screen. Generally, they'll get on the, get on the radio with either dispatch or some of the real-time crime center and say, hey, do the research, like, what plate is this, run it for me, give me the description, give me the year. And they'll visually do that verification, uh, instead of having to look at more time looking at a computer screen to figure that out for themselves.

But that's all the manual process that takes place. Did that answer your question? Yeah, so, and because I know there's been discussion in the national media about false positives and things like that, so, you know, I'm looking at that license plate, I think a reasonable person could say that's a B, and you can, I mean, you can visually distinguish it from an 8, but let's say that was XY8, and so maybe the make and the model of the car comes up and says that it's a different vehicle than what the stolen view, so that's basically when the human is making some basically discretionary, just, or, you know, analyzing that information and making a decision. Is that right? Yes, ma'am.

And let's compare that, um, let's compare that really quick against what happens if we don't have an ALPR system. So currently officers have the ability in their car to run a license plate frequently. When I was on patrol, that was the plate or the screen that was up in my car. You can run a license plate and the exact same process is happening once it's just the, the operator is, is doing everything manually. So the officer has to get the license plate correct to punch it in, and then when the return comes back, the officer has to verify.

And, and one of the challenges that comes up is when the license plate comes back and the license plate doesn't match the car. We get that— could be a stolen plate, could be a stolen vehicle with a stolen plate. There's a whole host of things that could be happening. And, and whether we have license plate readers or not, the officers have to go through the manual process of determining whether or not they do have a stolen vehicle, it is the right vehicle, the plate is matching, um, warrants. So under our current APSEN system that officers have access to in their car— not the license plate reader, license plate readers are not connected to APSEN— but you'll get hits for a much, much broader range of information in the APSEN system than what the license plate reader system.

So locates misdemeanor warrants, felony warrants, across the board, those are all in the APSEN system. When an officer runs a license plate in their car, all of those hits come up in that manual process. So you can imagine what the officer has to go through to be able to determine, am I going to stop that car based on the hit that I'm going to get? Like, they have to develop, um, depending on what it is, generally reasonable suspicion, probable cause to be able to stop that vehicle with the information that they're getting on their screen. That system and that verification process substantially more complicated than when you get on— when I get a hit on ALPR, because it's limited data that we're putting into the system.

Uh, the system will always be limited on what we can put it in, and the reason is because the national database that we're hooking up to for stolen vehicles, that's relatively easy to connect to. What's difficult is when we want to start putting more information in there Somebody has to sit down and do that, so no one's ever going to do that, uh, and we're not going to connect it to the AFSEN system. So, uh, this— the data that's available in the license plate reader system is always going to be significantly more narrowed to, uh, to a smaller database. And again, just to kind of go back to the focus again of the Real Time Crime Center and the technology we bought, the idea here is real-time crime that we're trying to impact. Thanks.

I have Mr. Perez-Rodilla, then Mr. Handeland. I just want to go back through what you said and make sure I understand it. So first of all, are we talking about, as it relates to license plate readers, what currently is and what will be? We're talking about two different systems or just one? We're talking about everything that you see on the screen there today, and everything that I'm telling you that, that, that our current license plate reader does is actively doing right now.

Right. And is there— so that— because what I heard was two things. I heard that it, it— when it hits, it hits on a national database for stolen vehicles. And then there is sort of a, of a list of potential things, like your staff would, would type in a license plate and say, we're looking for a license plate because of this reason, and then that would be in a database, and it may hit on that as well. Is that correct?

But we would have to put that in, in, in advance? That's correct. We will, we will type that license plate into APSEN, right? Either the officer, someone in the Real Time Crime Center, a dispatcher, call taker, will type that in and we'll pull up that absence screen. That's going to give us our verified state information, and we'll compare it against that, the ALPR reading that we got, and the vehicle that's in front of us.

Right, so, so there's no other sort of— there's the, um, we have to have put something in in advance for it to hit, other than the stolen vehicle? Yes, sir. Okay, thank you. Okay, next Mr. Handel and then Ms. Scout.

Yeah, so I mean, if I guess I understand this, so if you took my license plate and put it in, like, okay, as I was driving into town today, I passed a police officer, you would get, I guess, the kind of the pinpoints of where that vehicle was at certain times, essentially back, uh, 14 days there? No, the officers have no access to that data. The officers, whether they punch it in, your license plate into APSEN, that's not connected to any GPS data, or the license plate reader hits on your license plate, that information is being collected. Yeah, no, I mean, at the Real Time Crime Center, like, you guys could, I guess, for 14 days, I guess, look back and, I guess, get kind of a pinpoint of, hey, where this vehicle was within the municipality. Yes.

Okay. Yeah, the Real Time Crime Center. Now, there's some rules on that. There has to be a criminal case attached to that. There's a tracking mechanism that's in place.

The case number has to be added to, uh, to the search query. And because we only have a limited number of people that can get access to the search function right now, uh, it will— for— I mean, it's always going to reside with the Real Time Crime Center. It's very, very easy to see who's looking for what, why they look for it. Very, very easy to audit. It becomes an unmanageable nightmare to try to audit when you have 400 cops that have access to all that sort of stuff.

So we're— we'll keep it to a small scope, and that's really linked to the data that we're going to put out annually that's connected to the LPR policy. Um, doing a report on the things that we're going to report on when we have a lot of people accessing it is just— it's going to be unmanageable. Okay. And then I guess with the 14 days, uh, for that, I mean, I'm assuming that if it's tied to a criminal investigation, if it's, oh hey, we're looking for Jared's car over here and we're gonna go and put that in. Like, okay, we're gonna download that data and stuff for, for potentially a criminal investigation.

That's correct. Yes, that's how it's preserved.

One question. Time, one more time. Okay. Yeah, sorry, it relates to what he just said. So I just want to get the— would it only record the license plate if it was a hit?

No, all the data that's running in that license, that license plate reader is just throwing it in a In a mass— so every license plate that is a 14 days is in there? Okay, thank you. So you can go back and search for license plates if there was a criminal case related to it, and if there was a reason, and if they had the right person that met all the rules, you could go back and search for a license plate during that period of time, whether it— there was a hit on it or not? That's correct. Okay, thanks.

And I want to back up just a little bit, um, so like a little historical context to where our brain is. License plate reader technology has been around for over 20 years. This is, this is not a new piece of technology. Um, we have some, some trauma in our community when it comes to things like license plate readers or, you know, red light cameras or maybe cameras in school zones from, you know, 35 years ago. And so this piece of technology was always something that wasn't super high on our list there's a lot of benefits to it.

But we always knew that of the one piece of technology that came with this package, the license plate reader technology was going to be the one that was like, eh, I don't know if Alaskans want their GPS data collected for 14 days. And, um, and so that's why we drafted the policy. And when I had a couple of the presentations that I previously given the body, uh, I was pretty clear about the fact that, and I've used a couple case examples. Uh, we've had cases here recently without license plate readers where they've been high-profile cases, whether they're missing people or sexual assaults or homicide cases that there's been public interest in, that, uh, when we didn't have license plate readers or it's outside the 14-day window and we have an associated vehicle and plate with it, being able to plug that plate in and, and be able to solve or find a person is useful. And so the intent always of presenting the use of license plate readers to us here in Anchorage was, is there an acceptable retention security measures in place where we can have access to this data that we know is going to be helpful in criminal investigations and some non-criminal?

Because remember, missing persons is not a criminal case. That's an acceptable level for us when it comes to privacy. That was always the question. That was the way the policy was drafted, and that's the way we've moved forward and rolled out the, the data. So I think that's important to understand as we kind of move forward down the next months of our lives that's going to be consumed by some of this stuff, is understanding that, um, that that's a balance that we have to play.

Uh, it's an extremely useful tool, uh, and, and that, to be honest, that's why a lot of the license plate readers have, have retention data for months and months and months and years in some cases, because being able to go back and look at that historical data has just proven grossly successful.

Okay, thanks. I have, uh, Miss Scout, and then, uh, I have a question. I'm gonna have to ask it on behalf of Miss Baldwin-Day, so she'll be next in the queue, but go ahead. Okay, um, what I'm hearing are— and this is not my first time being briefed on the Real Time Crime Center, so I appreciate the additional information, um, And what I've heard time and time again are really strong internal practices, the 14 days, the limited access to the Real Time Crime Center footage. I want to clarify that what you're talking about, these are internal APD policies, correct?

Yes, ma'am. And who—. Kind of. Remember, we have legal standards we got to follow, too. Yes.

Yeah. And so I would love to kind of get a peek behind the curtain there of who sets the policies. What does it take to change an internal policy at the police department if you're not police chief in 4 years, 5 years, you know, and we have this technology existing and there's somebody who is at a different place on the warrior guardian scale of policing, like, yeah, what does it take to change a policy in the police department? Yes, ma'am. So let me back up just a little bit, uh, because I think it's going to give a little context to answer your question.

Um, I think one of the challenges that, that we're going to struggle through together over the next couple of months is some of the questions and some of the concerns are laying a foundation of we have to protect the public from the police department. Like, but yeah, that, that's clearly some of the issue. Like, some of the internal mechanisms and what— I can't tell you how many people have asked the question, how do you stop cops from stalking their girlfriends, because of an article. And like, I've gotten that question so many times. Yeah.

And, and, and so I think we have to understand it from like a broader breadth. There are so many mechanisms in place. It is— we can't change a policy. I can change the policy today, uh, the next chief can come along and change the policy. Uh, I, I don't think this body, whether or not half of you are here or gone in a couple years, uh, or this community or the media is going to allow certain policies to be changed without going, hey, why are you doing that?

What— help us understand why we needed to change something within a policy. So I think we're, we're kind of setting that up. We also have to understand the consequences of an, of an officer, uh, misusing, or an employee misusing any database whatsoever. Some of it criminal, some of it administrative, lost a job.

And the other piece of it is we do have to just constantly keep in mind that we have a very, very, very restrictive right to privacy. And so the next chief can't come in and just go, I'm gonna open this policy. I'm gonna blow this thing up. I'm a crime control guy and I'm gonna hit it hard. And we're putting a stop to crime in Anchorage.

And these are the things I'm gonna do. Like they can't. Like, we just don't have the ability to do whatever we want with technology in the state of Alaska. Like, it's, it's unlawful. So there's already those practices in place.

And I think the, the other thing that we need to consider is when we look at the technology that we have access to, completely independent of this license plate readers, because this is kind of the catalyst of the conversation we just simply are not going to be able to open that up and let you look under that hood. We just can't. There's just like policies that you go to and it's just blank. It's like, yeah, it's kind of a tactical thing. We have investigations that if I just laid out every piece of technology we could use, we have investigations that would just be done, like they're over instantly.

So I think the real question is, is where do we— where are we comfortable with— we want these questions answered, and we want to know about this, and we want to make sure that we have certain things in this realm, you know, governed or known about or in policy or the public being aware of. And some stuff that we're like, hey, now we're kind of in— we're, we're intruding on investigations that's going to cause a much broader negative impact when it comes to crime in the future. And so I think from the beginning, that's kind of always been my, my perspective, is like, we are taking this journey together and we're going to walk down this road and And I can tell you the hotel room specifically I was in drafting these three policies on a trip with my daughter, working with assembly members on these policies, because that's, that's the level of importance it rises to. Like, we, we got to figure this out together. Yeah, I know that was a roundabout way of answering your questions, but yep, I can change a policy.

Thank you. Okay, next, it's actually on the same topic. Summarizing questions from Ms. Baldwin-Day. What is the utility of having rules around police technology in APD policy versus code? And then what rules are already in code versus those policies and procedures?

And so, and I think probably that's a follow-up that might be helpful in more detail, but that's, I think, getting into that code versus policy is the intent. Yeah, so definitely a follow-up question, but I do kind of just want to drop something right in the middle of the room, because I know it's something that's, you know, people are very passionate about, but just as a thinking tool. We have a code right now that limits two things: facial recognition and the use of drones. Right now we have code language on that. And when we think about code, that's way harder to change than policy.

Code is not going to keep up with technology. Code is not going to be able to keep up with the benefits of technology. And so when we put something in, in code, we just have to understand that today, if I came to you and said, hey, there's a piece of facial recognition technology— which I am not, by the way— that is very, very helpful for us, that has you know, limitations on it. It's reduced bias that we know was existent in 2016 with facial recognition technology. Like some of the things that we're concerned about, this piece of technology would greatly help us.

The fact that that's in code makes that exceptionally hard to change versus this conversation in a demo, in another conversation, in a draft policy language. That's a different animal. Uh, we are just— code in and of itself is not going to be able to keep up with how agile a police department needs to be in a modern world to try to even remotely keep up with crime. It just won't.

Okay, thank you. Um, next, uh, Miss Silvers.

Um, if you were to decide, uh, to just change the policy tomorrow.

Um, how would the assembly or the public know? Like, is there requirements for you to let people know that you're changing code, or, uh, so this particular policy, there's no requirements that we, we notify the public. It's obviously a policy that's in the public view. You can go online and look at it. So that's live kept and updated.

If we updated tomorrow, that policy will be updated live on the website so you can easily see that. We certainly have reporting requirements that we're going to put out annually based on the policy. So that's another example of we see an annual report come out 2 years in a row, 3 years in a row, and all of a sudden the data either is gone, we stop reporting, or the data is drastically different. I would hope that someone would go, hey, why, why is this different? There's also the quarterly review that we put in the policy as well.

Uh, and you know, I've got, uh, the municipal attorney here with me. And when, when we were drafting this policy, one of the, the questions that came up in that, in that quarterly review, which is specific to that scale— the benefit, uh, to the concern with privacy— that was, that's the scale that's in policy in all three of the policies that impact the Real Time Crime Center. Uh, I quarterly review every single time we use this, every time we get a request from outside agency, if we give information to an outside agency, if we have a hit on a license plate and it goes drastically wrong. All of that information I review on a quarterly basis, and I mentioned Ms. Gardner because she's more than happy to have her office in that policy as well, that we both do it. That was certainly part of the discussion originally.

So we're actively monitoring that every single quarter, and again, also open up to have the ability to— what did that look like the last quarter there, Chief? What'd you look at? Did you forget to do it? Tell us what that looks like. We put that stuff in there to raise the level of expectation.

That the public in this body will hold accountable to.

Okay, thank you. Um, other members in the queue? And, and just to know— one second, Mr. Gates. Um, I think it is helpful to follow up if, again, if you could provide kind of code citations and versus the policies. I think people are interested in understanding that.

Mr. Gates?

Uh, yes, thank you. Um, I just wanted to mention one thing that Chief Case said is that our policy has to be consistent with law, right? They have to follow the legal standards. That's some of the limitations they have when they're writing their policy. And I guess historically we had some code in place for drone usage and facial recognition usage.

We passed those ordinances before they wrote their policy, if I remember correctly. Is that right, Chief Case? And here we're in a little different situation because they have policy already written, adopted. It's there online. I mean, I've read it.

I think some of you have which before we have an ordinance or code that sets out some parameters that I guess the governing body here has decided we want to set some guardrails. So this is really important, you know, if I guess there's some things about current policy that some members don't like, probably you want to put something in the ordinance that was laid on the table Tuesday, sort of make some change. What's in code supersedes and preempts what's in policy. So if that passes and it's inconsistent with what's in policy. It doesn't mean that they can continue the policy.

The chief case, the law department's probably going to have to go back and change it, and that's my understanding. Is that correct? Yes. Thank you. Thank you.

Um, so we got about 5 minutes left. Um, are there additional questions from members? Maybe we can, um, finish up the slides. Or is— Absolutely. I will skip the next one because we've pretty much covered that.

Uh, this is in policy. I can briefly, the audit report that comes into any technology within the Real Time Crime Center. If we look at our license plate reader policy, we've talked pretty much about every one of these points that are on here.

This is just the statement that I just mentioned a minute ago about the— on a quarterly basis that we'll review, kind of weigh that positive to benefits. Um, I, I, the reason why I put this slide up is I, I, I go door to door sometimes in some of your neighborhoods. I was in Northeast Community Council yesterday, and it's very, very interesting when you knock on people's doors and you ask them, what's your public safety concerns? And, uh, many of the things that I hear public safety concerns are still Hey, could we get some speed bumps for you Northeast folks on Dubin? One of the requests I got from two people.

Uh, it's not technology, uh, it's not license plate readers, it's not the right to privacy. It is, I live in this community and those speed bumps would kind of help me feel a little more secure because I got kids running around, don't want to get hit by a car. Um, and so I, I think it's always important that we keep We keep that into perspective that the vast majority of the population that we have here in the community are concerned about things that are like just the daily mundane, "I just need this a little bit better and my life gets a lot better." Two more slides for you. The first one, and you've seen this slide before, there's been academic research on real-time crime centers, peer-reviewed published articles from academic settings on what real-time crime centers look like, the impact they have on solvability. You see the study on the left from Hartford, Connecticut, 442% more likely to solve cases where there's real-time crime center activity involved, and reduction in crime when we have real-time crime centers.

The one on the right is a Miami study that looked at activating a real-time crime center, saw a lot of benefits to it in terms of solve rate and crime, and then went back years later to see if that was just a blip in the screen or if that held consistent over time. And that study shows that it's consistent over time. Last thing to bring this home in terms of a week and a couple days when we vote, this is what we are voting on, um, right now. This is the second room that we've put our Real Time Crime Center in. If you look at the lower right-hand corner, uh, you see a little computer screen next to that officer's two large screens.

That is his computer from his car, and he is running our computer-aided dispatch off of his computer in his car, which by the way currently is designed to run off a large widescreen. We do not have the technology available at the police department to give him a screen and run computer-aided dispatch off a real screen. He's using it off of a mobile data computer that's supposed to be going in his car. The operator that you see in the upper corner Uh, just the other day, uh, we actually had someone touring the Real Time Crime Center, and he went to his cell phone to call the officer out in the field to provide him with some information that didn't need to go over the radio system, hit the number to call the officer, and had to hang that up and go to a landline because we just don't have, uh, the cellular capability to connect the call at that point in time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

So, uh, moving us out of that closet giving them chairs to sit in that's comfortable sitting for a 10-hour shift, desk, computer screens. That's what this money is for, is for that basic equipment. The technology in and of itself has already been purchased. It's not going to impact how we use the technology. We are going to continue to run this center the way it's operating right now, just moving it to someplace that's easier to use, the signals better, adequate screens, uh, things of that nature.

That's all I have. Okay, thank you. Um, Mr. Martinez, go ahead. Uh, just a quick question on the funding again. Where is this funding from, and is it dedicated for this purpose, or are there—.

Is there latitude with other purposes? This is, uh, federal forfeiture funds. So our task force officers that are assigned to federal agencies that assist them with investigations, uh, down the road when the federal process runs its course, uh, when there are asset forfeitures, the agencies that assist those federal agencies or the local— so in this case, APD— that assists those federal agencies, uh, will get part of that forfeiture money, and that gets deposited into the police department account, and it sits there, and anytime we want to use it We have to come to the assembly to appropriate the funds to use it, and we have to get— which was already done, everyone voted yes for that— and then we have to get permission on how we want to use those funds. So that's the one that's still in question for just over a week. So there's, there is some latitude on how these funds can be used, but there's also some very strict requirements.

We cannot use forfeiture funds for operating budget. We can't fund people, we can't fund things that are in our operating budget. We can't supplant with this, with this money. And just for clarification, the municipality can't absorb those back into the general funds, or they are dedicated to purposes because of the—. I don't believe they can.

I'm not that— I'm not an expert in that question. I don't believe they can. But yeah, thank you. Okay, thank you. So we are at 11:40.

Um, uh, so sorry. Oh, uh, Mr. Gates, go ahead. Sorry, Chief, I just wanted to ask, that fund, you also can only use it for equipment, not like replacing equipment, like I guess computers or whatever. You can't replace equipment they're all using. Is that one restricted to only new?

Correct. We can, we can use it to purchase equipment, but we certainly can't use it if we're funded to buy certain equipment. So for example, let's assume, which, which we don't, but radios, for example, that was a funding stream we got from the municipality. We couldn't then use forfeiture money to buy radios even though we've been funded to do that. Incidentally, we've kept radios for these very reasons on grants.

So we've purchased that over and over through grant funding instead of having that rolled in. So there's pros and cons for either way, but there's limitations.

Okay, thank you. So we are at 11:41. So we are out of time for this work session. I will again just note this was a general briefing on the Real Time Crime Center. At APD, but also AM524-2026, which will be on our meeting as a continued item.

It does not have a public hearing because it was— it's a memorandum and it was originally on the consent agenda. So just to set public expectations, but that item will be on our September 1st agenda. So thank you, everyone. We'll be adjourned from this work session and we'll start our committee meeting in about 10 minutes. Thank you.