A North Texas city has told a privacy advocate he must pay about $2.3 million up front before it will search for records on how its police use Flock Safety license plate cameras, according to a Texas Tribune report published Monday.
The invoice from North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth suburb, priced the work at $15 an hour, which the Tribune calculated as more than 14 years of labor to comb through roughly a terabyte of messages about mistakes, misuse and whether the system works. A city spokesperson confirmed the invoice to the Tribune but would not answer questions.
The request came from a man who goes by the pseudonym Phil Mynona and leads the Texas Privacy Coalition, which opposes mass surveillance. He told the Tribune he has filed close to identical requests with nearly 200 police and sheriff's departments.
The highest bill he had seen before this one was about $5,000, from Victoria, he said, and he called the North Richland Hills figure ludicrous.
Same records, very different prices
The Tribune found wide gaps in how agencies treat these requests. Sealy, a small city west of Houston, released more than 400,000 pages for free, according to the advocate. Houston station KPRC reported being quoted $121,000 by the Harris County Sheriff's Office. Irving wants $70,000 for records Carrollton provided at no cost, according to the conservative site Current Revolt, as cited by the Tribune.
State agencies have also pulled back. The Tribune said the Department of Public Safety gave it a full list of searches on its Flock network in July, including those by outside agencies, but limited a second release in August to its own searches and then asked the attorney general's office for permission to withhold the data entirely.
DPS operates over 900 of the roughly 13,000 Flock cameras thought to be in use statewide. TxDOT, the agency that issues permits for plate readers along state highways, declined to say how many it has approved or where, citing public safety in a challenge to the attorney general.
