Texas City Demands $2.3M for Public Records on Police Flock Use
North Richland Hills has quoted a price of $2.3 million to release records regarding its police force's use of Flock number plate cameras, calculated by estimating 14 years of labor at $15 per hour. This is in contrast to another Texas city, Sealy, which provided similar records for free, and Irving, which charged only $70,000.
Under the EU's law enforcement directive, such information should be logged automatically and made available to the data protection authority upon request, without any fee or labor estimate.
A recent audit, initiated by a USA Today request, revealed a Lufkin officer conducting extensive searches on police databases about his former girlfriend and her associates. Zachary Anthony Klein was subsequently indicted for 100 felony counts and sentenced to five years in prison.
Texas has approximately 13,000 Flock cameras as part of a wider network of over 100,000 across America. While only 16 agencies in Texas publish their search records, the state's police force is now seeking to withhold this data entirely by freezing state funding.
In Britain, national standards for number plate recognition require detailed audit trails, including login information and all successful and failed searches, with data being deleted after 90 days.