Tampa Mayor Jane Castor outside Tampa Police Headquarters // Chris Young, WMNF News, 10/28/24
The City of Tampa requested a study from RedSpeed looking at speed violations in 31 school zones.
They found that 18 of those locations are averaging between 200 to 3,000 speeding violations a day.
In response the police department is asking to expand the number of school zone cameras.
But, members of the city council are concerned about RedSpeeds partnership with Flock Safety, an AI generated software that reads license plates.
According to the ACLU, Flock Safety works as a surveillance tool since it “allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention.” The ACLU has also criticized before Immigrations and Customs Enforcement accessing the Flock database.
“It’s not people are not concerned about the police department,” said Councilwoman Amanda Lynn Hurtak. “they’re concerned about the federal government and ICE using it, that’s the issue. But I think the bigger concern is that the Florida legislature just completely preempts our ability to regulate them.”
But Assistant City Attorney Mike Schmidt says Flock is not involved in the cameras.
“So this is literally just a camera right now that is trying to capture speed data and the information in order to process the violation that’s necessary,” Schmidt said. “Other data winds up getting deleted and destroyed, and then the data needed for processing those ones that are determined violations can be kept by the law for 90 days, and you can’t use it for surveillance.”
City council approved the motion with one dissenting vote.
City staff said the program will have a public education period before the cameras began ticketing.
No other information has been released about the public education period.
It is unclear when the physical cameras will be installed at the 18 selected campuses.