Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo has asked the Office of County Administration to bring Commissioners Court a full accounting of the county’s automated license plate reader cameras, the system most people know by the name of its vendor, Flock. The county’s next Commissioners Court meeting is Thursday, October 15 at 9 a.m. at 1001 Preston Street in Houston, with a virtual option.
What the Report Is Supposed to Cover
The Katy News reported on October 9 that Hidalgo requested the update after residents raised privacy concerns, and listed what she directed county administration to produce. Six things, working with the relevant departments:
- A summary of the technology and how the county uses it, including how many devices there are and where they are
- Total funding authorized and spent under each license plate reader agreement
- Which agencies administer the devices, how many each one administers, and what administering actually involves
- Which outside parties can get at the data, how often it has been searched, and for what purposes
- How other jurisdictions protect this kind of data
- For anything the county does not know or cannot verify, why it does not know it and which department would hold the answer
That last item is the unusual one. It asks the county to account for its own gaps, which suggests the basic facts about how many cameras the county operates and who has been searching their data are not currently in one place.
What Is Confirmed and What Is Not
The meeting date is confirmed on the county’s own agenda portal, which lists a Commissioners Court meeting on October 15 and no meeting on October 13 or 14. The request and the scope above come from The Katy News. The itemized agenda for the October 15 meeting had not been posted when this was written, so this story is written around what the county judge has asked for rather than around a published agenda line. Harris County’s meeting notices state that supplemental agenda items can be published up to three business days before a meeting.
The Background
Harris County Precinct 4 took 61 license plate cameras offline last week over privacy concerns, which this paper covered in its report on October 8. That shutdown was a precinct decision. A countywide report to Commissioners Court would be the first time the full picture, across every precinct and every agency with access, is put in front of the court in one document. Lake Houston area residents are Harris County residents, so county policy on where these cameras sit and who can search what they record applies here as much as anywhere else in the county.
