After almost two hours of discussion and public comment, the Woodstock City Council rejected a proposal to install security cameras on the Woodstock Square – for now.

Mayor Mike Turner was absent Tuesday evening during the vote on the matter, which failed in a 3-3 tie, since four votes are needed for a measure to pass. City Manager Roscoe Stelford said Turner could bring the topic back for a vote if he so chooses.

The contract up for consideration was with Flock Safety, the same company behind the city’s license plate readers. Some of the residents who raised concerns about the cameras cited Flock specifically.

Amid the controversy, there was a push to delay the vote on the cameras. Council members Darrin Flynn, Melissa McMahon and Natalie Ziemba voted to postpone the vote, while Gregg Hanson, Bob Seegers and Tom Nierman voted against postponement.

That failed, so the council voted on whether to move forward with the cameras. Hanson, Seegers and Nierman voted for the cameras, and Flynn, McMahon and Ziemba voted against them.

McMahon said she was concerned with how the data would be collected, stored and shared, noting that she might be a little more comfortable if much stricter guidelines were in place. She said later that she was not opposed to cameras but rather the vendor.

McMahon added that eight years ago, when the City Council considered cameras for the Square, people didn’t expect how data, artificial intelligence and privacy concerns would advance.

Police Chief John Lieb said the idea of cameras was in response to a homicide in 2017, adding that investigators had to go business to business to get footage to use as evidence.

Lieb cited an increasing number of public events that take place on the Square, and the reality that tragedies happen, for which surveillance footage is useful.

But McMahon said, “Across the country, we’re seeing examples of Flock technology being used to [track] individuals across state lines,” including people going to Illinois, with its stronger privacy and reproductive rights laws.

McMahon said the Illinois Secretary of State’s Office has called out Flock, and she’s worried the surveillance will “make people feel watched, not welcomed.”

Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias alleged that Flock illegally shared data with federal border enforcement, according to Capitol News Illinois.

A Flock spokesperson said the company does not have “any contractual relationships” with U.S. Immigraton and Customs Enforcement or any other Department of Homeland Security agency. The company does not have facial-recognition technology or have any such technology in development.

Flock uses AI and machine learning “solely to improve the accuracy of reading license plates and identifying vehicle characteristics,” according to the company.

But McMahon said she was concerned that “we’re not going to find out they access our data until they come and pick somebody off the street. That, I’m not willing to even entertain.“

She said that she plans many of the large Square events and is still not backing the cameras.

But others on the council disagreed. Nierman said the cameras are simply photographing and filming people on the Square.

“It’s day-to-day images of people going through the Square. It’s not their credit card stuff. It’s not their whatever. I’m not quite sure why this is such a big, big, big deal,” Nierman said. “Well, this is what we’re voting on now. We’re not voting on something futuristic down the road.”

Seegers said he would vote for the cameras and that, for years, “we had a constant stream of complaints of wrongdoings and ... bad people hanging in the Square and no ability for the police to follow up.”

Seegers added that in today’s society, there is nowhere people can walk in “any substantial city” and not be on camera. He said he told his kids growing up not to do anything wrong because cameras are always recording, which he said was effective.

Lieb said the data the city collects from the cameras would belong to the city.

“Nobody gets it unless we have a legitimate criminal investigation issue,” Lieb said.

However, Lieb confirmed that the license plate readers are in a nationwide searchable database. Bu he said the data from the cameras would not be.

Lieb said the data remains for 30 days and has to be saved to be retained longer. Lieb said it’s not stored in Flock’s database, and “the false information that they sell it or they use it or they are tracking people is absolutely false.”

Stelford added that with the cameras, permission would have to be given to other agencies to access the information, and evidence would need to be provided. He said Flock seemed to be working on trying to improve system security.

Stelford said the license plate readers have helped with solving crimes in Woodstock. He said that although it’s impossible to completely safeguard such systems, police use of multifactor authentication is being mandated in many states and can be a “significant deterrence.”

Lieb confirmed that Woodstock police require multifactor authentication.

The proposed three-year contract was for six Flock security cameras for the Square. It carried an estimated $21,800 price tag for the first year, offset in part by a $9,000 grant from the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. Subsequent years would cost $21,500, according to city documents.

Lieb said the city uses 12 Flock automatic license plate readers.

Woodstock officials last year approved security cameras for Benton and Main streets, which lead up to the Square. Those cameras were purchased from Siemens and came with a price tag of $62,600, with total setup costs not to exceed $85,000.

Stelford said those cameras are high-end, and they do support facial recognition but are not used for that. He added that the original thought was to use those cameras on the Square, but officials later said that was too cost-prohibitive.

The Benton/Main cameras passed without much discussion from the City Council. Flynn said Tuesday that people didn’t go to that meeting, and as a business owner, there are times he wished the Square cameras existed.

Several members of the public spoke against the Square cameras Tuesday, citing concerns about excessive surveillance and suspected cooperation with federal law enforcement. Some of the speakers said they were not opposed to cameras but to Flock specifically.

The Flock spokesperson echoed that each agency owns and controls all of its data, and no other agency can access it unless the agency chooses to share it. He emphasized that data is deleted after 30 days unless local law or policy requires otherwise. Searches are logged “for accountability and oversight,” the spokesperson said.

Some commenters expressed the idea of hiring more cops rather than installing cameras, but officials said it would be more expensive to do that.

A resident who only gave her first name told the council that she did not feel safe as a Mexican-American and U.S. citizen and can’t go out without being watched.

Woodstock resident Gigi Carlson said she hoped there would be transparency and notification that people would be recorded. She asked the city to table the Flock vote, and noted that, given how quickly AI is changing the world, a three-year contract might be too long.

Stelford said there is no notification requirement, and people are being watched by private cameras on the Square, but he confirmed that the city would be able to get out of the contract if it doesn’t fund it in the future.

Another resident who didn’t give her full name said cameras don’t mean more protection, just more tracking of local people, and it’s not just local police but also federal agencies such as ICE.

“Woodstock is known as a place that prides itself on inclusivity and inclusion. Just a month ago, we celebrated Mexican Independence Day right here on the Square, celebrating the very people that are now” disproportionately affected by the technology, she said.

Lieb said the police department has been researching the system for years.

“This is the right technology at the right time,” and if police are looking for a specific vehicle, that would be the only time the readers and cameras interact, he said.

Grant Talabay, an attorney who said he writes, speaks and publishes about civil liberties, said Flock cameras are “widely and accurately described as instruments of mass surveillance.”

Talabay said “a community should not feel like it’s under constant surveillance,” adding that he fears the cameras would do that while decreasing public trust.

“We’re talking about a public square – a place of enjoyment for the entire community," Talabay said. “This sort of government surveillance is inherently dystopian and most certainly un-American.”