In a surprise, the Palm Coast City Council approved a five-year, $304,000 plan potentially to integrate all city surveillance cameras–on streets, in parks, on and inside buildings, at utility and other facilities–with the Flagler County Sheriff’s Real Time Crime Center.
The proposal was sprung on the council with unusual lack of transparency. It was not discussed by the City Council at a previous meeting or workshop. The item was listed on the council agenda’s “consent” portion on Tuesday–that portion of the agenda where normally routine items are taken up as a group and approved with one vote, unless a council member opts to single one out for discussion.
Only City Council member Theresa Pontieri appeared to have noticed its significance and pulled it for discussion–not because of the system’s purpose or implications, but because of its cost to the city.
“This one bothers me,” Pontieri said. “Obviously I’m all about public safety, but for me, the sheriff’s office should be paying for this, not the city of Palm Coast.” What was presented to the council, Sheriff Rick Staly said Thursday–and explained to Pontieri after the meeting–was not the complete story, however.
The Real Time Crime Center is itself networked into an array of resources, including the city’s traffic cameras, as well as the select cameras of other agencies and, to some extent, those of private individuals and businesses who voluntarily participate in a surveillance registry.
The integration with the city will significantly expand those capabilities and give the Sheriff’s Office immediate access to the camera streams, though the city will retain control of the network, the software, and the implementation of the system, including which streams are fed to the Sheriff’s Office and which are not.
Integration will enable the RTCC to fuse and follow the movements of individuals or vehicles across the city–wherever cameras are part of the system–and link the data to other capabilities of the RTCC system, such as license plate readers (LPRs) and artificial intelligence software. AI capabilities make “locating potential suspects or missing persons by clothing, color and type, along with vehicles involved in crashes or incidents based on color, model, etc., more efficient,” a sheriff’s presentation states. The data would not be streamed only through the Real Time Crime Center, but would also be accessible to deputies.
Doug Akins, the city’s director of information technology, said the contract with Axon is structured in such a way as to preserve the city’s control over all aspects of its hardware and software.
“It started with a request from the sheriff’s office, and there were several ways we could integrate with them,” Doug Akins, the city’s director of information technology, told the council. “From our perspective, the safest way was to implement the platform ourselves and then share the cameras with the sheriff’s office through the platform, as opposed to having another agency’s equipment on our network that we didn’t have any control over updates or taking it off network. If there was a breach, they could allow third parties through that access.” For the city. It’s a matter of security. “We would be using the cameras ourselves for the video piece of it, and then sharing it with the sheriff’s office.”
The system, called Fusus, is a product of the Axon company, which provides the Sheriff’s Office and innumerable law enforcement agencies their body cameras, Tasers, drones, license plate readers and other hardware and software. The Sheriff’s Office in March hosted an Axon expo on the grounds of the Operations Center in Bunnell.
“When he said ‘the sheriff’s office requested,’ that is not accurate,” Staly said. “We requested the ability to immediately view their cameras, and we gave them a way to do it without costing the city anything. They chose to go out and get bids from Fusus themselves.” The Sheriff’s Office also offered to help the city negotiate with Axon, since it had a long relationship with the company. “We didn’t ask them to buy the system they bought. We asked them for access to their camera. We gave them a way to do it for free.”
Staly said several agencies and individuals cooperate with the agency’s Real Time Crime Center by enabling their surveillance systems–whatever the make, whatever the specifications–to “talk” to the RTCC through so-called “cores” that agencies and individuals can buy, as some do (Staly said they’re inexpensive) or through cores provided by the Sheriff’s Office. The agency was prepared to give Palm Coast free cores to enable its existing system to communicate with the RTCC. The city chose not to do that–for entirely valid reasons the sheriff recognizes.
The city is concerned about any breach in its digital wall in an age of phishing, ransomware and data theft. “Implementing the FUSUS platform directly—rather than through a third party—empowers the City to retain full control over its camera hardware, configurations, and cybersecurity posture,” Akins’s memo to council members about the proposal states. “This control is critical in maintaining a secure and resilient infrastructure, particularly as digital threats continue to evolve. The City can manage device access, conduct timely software updates, and remove any devices from the network in response to threats or changes in operational needs. Additionally, by controlling the platform settings, the City ensures that camera configurations are not inadvertently overridden or altered by outside entities.”
But that means the city bears the costs.
Council members on Tuesday discussed possibly assigning the costs to the sheriff’s contract over the next five years. But Staly won’t go for that.
“Absolutely I’m not going to pay it,” he said. “I have already provided $2 million within the city of Palm Coast for all our LPRs, because that’s how I reduce crime and I catch criminals. That’s not in their contract. They’re not paying any of that, and that has to be upgraded every three or four years.” Staly said he’d asked the city to add license plate readers at the entrance to city parks. The city has declined. He hasn’t installed them there, but has done so elsewhere. “They haven’t paid a dime for that in their contract.” Staly said his efforts to integrate city and sheriff surveillance systems go back to his days as undersheriff.
“We really appreciate the partnership. I want to make that very clear. This was a long time coming,” Staly said. “They’ll have to explain why they did it their way instead of the free way from us. I understand why they chose that way because every network administrator is concerned about getting hacked or getting a virus, so every time you allow somebody else into your system it’s potentially a risk. So I understand it, and they have probably gone above and beyond the security needs, because the cores are already CJIS-compliant, which means it’s going to be very difficult for somebody to hack into.” CJIS, or Criminal Justice Information Services, is the FBI’s massive database supporting law enforcement, national security, the intelligence community and the public.
The first-year implementation cost for Palm Coast is $31,475, rising to $99,000 in the second year, then $58,000 a year for three successive years. The council approved all items on the consent agenda, including the contract with Axon, but on a 4-1 vote, with Pontieri opposed, primarily, she said in an interview, because there were unanswered questions at the time, and she still has some. But the council took up the item toward the end of another grueling evening meeting.
“I am glad that they purchased the system. I’m not paying for it,” Staly said.
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