Amid a recent wave of scrutiny for Flock surveillance systems in the Kansas City region and across the country, Lee’s Summit Police Chief Travis Forbes defended his department’s use of the cameras, saying they were a helpful law enforcement tool.
According to Lee’s Summit’s Flock web portal, the city has 54 of the company’s cameras in place. Those cameras have read more than 800,000 unique license plates over the past month. City Council members approved a roughly $900,000, five-year contract for the city’s Flock program in August 2023.
At Tuesday night’s Lee’s Summit City Council meeting, Forbes said he understood the concerns that some have raised around the use of the cameras but said the city had strong safeguards in place against the misuse of information collected by the cameras…