Surveillance News Roundup

The Overland Park Public Safety Committee recently discussed ALPR (automated license plate reader) policy in a public meeting. We appreciate that the conversation is happening. Here's what came out of it:

• OPPD retains license plate reader data for one year
• Local metro agencies on the ALPRWeb platform can access OPPD's reads
• Federal agencies can request data by contacting an OPPD administrator. The DEA was given as an example
• The city committed to creating an "ALPR transparency web page"

These are useful starting points, but a "transparency page" isn't governance.

Retention: A one-year retention period for non-investigative data is exceptionally long. Privacy-focused agencies like Providence, RI; Culver City, CA; and Ogden, UT use 30 days. To be clear, our proposal doesn't require detectives to lose evidence. Data tied to an active investigation stays as long as the case needs it. What it doesn't allow is storing every plate read in the city for a year on the off chance it might be useful someday. That's not targeted policing; it's bulk data retention.

Access: The question worth asking is what criteria are applied to federal data requests, and whether any have ever been denied.

Overland Park Police Chief Doreen Jokerst released a new policy regarding body camera footage.

The big change? The department now commits to the automatic release of body cam footage for "officer-involved critical incidents" (like shootings).

Chief Jokerst put it simply: "Trust is the foundation of effective policing... we recognize that in moments of crisis, the community expects and deserves clarity."

Next door in Lenexa, a troubling case came to light on Feb 3, 2026: Lenexa Police used their License Plate Reader system to track a resident after he wrote an op-ed critical of the department's cooperation with ICE.

Emails later revealed the Police Chief issued a BOLO ("Be On the Look Out") for the writer, explicitly telling officers to "Make Your Own Case" (MYOC). In plain English: officers were told to find their own reason to stop him. The stated reason for looking for him was that he had put up posters with "damaging glue," a minor ordinance violation.

It shows the risk isn't theoretical. Tools bought to fight violent crime were turned on a resident over a minor ordinance violation, right after he criticized the department in print.

You might have seen the headlines. After Ring aired a Super Bowl ad for its "Search Party" feature, which uses AI and a network of neighborhood cameras to find lost dogs, people immediately pointed out the surveillance implications. That backlash, combined with growing pressure over Flock Safety's connections to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection), pushed Amazon to cancel Ring's planned integration with Flock within days.

Good news, right? Sort of.

What most coverage missed is that Ring's partnership with Axon is completely unaffected. A Ring spokesperson confirmed it the same day. And the same day Ring-Flock was canceled, a sheriff's office in New York announced a brand new Axon-Ring Community Requests partnership.

Why does this matter here? Axon is the company that runs Overland Park's entire RTIC (Real-Time Information Center) system. The $22.4 million contract covers body cameras, license plate readers, drones, the Fusus integration platform (the software that connects all the camera feeds into one interface), and cloud storage. Ring's Community Requests program through Axon still allows law enforcement to send geo-targeted footage requests to every Ring owner in a given area.

The surveillance pipeline people were angry about this week didn't disappear. It runs through a different company. And that company is already here.

This one is worth understanding even if you don't follow surveillance policy.

In the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case this week, the FBI recovered video footage from her Google Nest doorbell. She didn't have an active Nest Aware subscription. The power to her home had been cut before the kidnapping. Most people would assume that means no footage exists.

They'd be wrong. Nest doorbells save roughly three hours of event-based video on Google's servers for free, even without a subscription. And when that data is "deleted," it isn't actually erased. It sits on Google's servers until it gets overwritten, the same way a file you drag to the trash on your computer isn't really gone until something else writes over that space.

This matters because a lot of the conversation around surveillance governance comes down to data retention. How long is your information kept? Who can access it? And what does "deleted" actually mean? The answer, in most cases, is that your data sticks around longer than you think, in places you didn't know about, accessible to people you didn't authorize.

One more thing. Flock Safety raised $275 million last year at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz. While over two dozen cities have since canceled or rejected Flock contracts (tracked by EFF and 404 Media), that fundraise provided them with a massive war chest to continue their aggressive expansion. The company is still growing at 70% year over year.

These companies are not going away. Which is exactly why local governance is the most effective lever any community has. We can't control what the industry does. We can control what Overland Park requires.

When we wrote this, the RTIC was set to go live for the FIFA World Cup. It's running now, which makes oversight of how it's used the next job.

We've drafted a governance proposal that addresses all of this: data ownership, retention limits, independent oversight, facial recognition prohibition, case-based access, and protections for your First Amendment rights. You can read the full proposal and sign up for updates at opvoice.org.

If you care about how these systems are used in our city, stay connected. Read the proposal, share it, and let your council members know you're paying attention.