Milwaukee, Wis. — A room full of Milwaukee residents came to Eckstein Hall on Tuesday with one question underneath all the others: if the cameras are watching everyone, who’s watching the cameras.
The occasion was “On the Issues: See Something, Scan Everything,” Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center forum on Flock license plate readers and the broader surveillance tools Milwaukee police now have at their disposal. Lubar Center Director Derek Mosley moderated a panel that included Melinda Brennan, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin; Jim Olson, police chief in DeForest and first vice president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association; and Heather Hough, chief of staff for the Milwaukee Police Department.
Urban News Journal was in the room. Watch the full field segment below, and the rest of this story is drawn from that recording.
The Question Everyone Was Really Asking
An attendee put it plainly, relaying a question from someone who couldn’t make it: if you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? Why not require a warrant, the same standard applied to a cell phone or a GPS tracker, before police can search plate data?
Hough didn’t dodge it. She walked the room through a real scenario. Say an officer runs his girlfriend’s plate. MPD won’t catch that in the moment, she said. But every 30 days, an audit runs across the system, flagging anyone searching an unusual number of plates, attaching too many plates to one case, or running searches alone on a case that should involve multiple investigators. When the audit catches something, it goes to a manual review, and from there, straight to the district attorney’s office.
That answer wasn’t hypothetical for the room. It described, almost point for point, what actually happened. A former Milwaukee officer, Josue Ayala, was convicted in June of attempted misconduct in public office after using the Flock system to track vehicles belonging to a woman he was dating and her ex-partner. The case is the reason this panel existed at all.
What Changed After Ayala
In the months after the Ayala case became public, MPD cut the number of officers with Flock access from roughly 370 down to just over 100. New users now go through vetting, including a screening for past misconduct, and have to complete training and sign an agreement stating the system is used only for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.
Then, in early September, Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced another round of restrictions. Camera access now goes to supervisors only, officers and detectives lost direct access, and searches are limited to Part I crimes like homicide and aggravated assault, plus critical cases such as missing persons or drug trafficking. Access is restricted to MPD itself, cutting out other agencies that previously could tap in. The department has also committed to a public dashboard and twice-yearly independent audits from the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission.
Hough was straightforward about the timeline. Guardrails, she said, tend to get built after something goes wrong, not before. “Could I, as a human being, wish I could have predicted all of the possibilities of risk ahead of time? Absolutely,” she told the room. “I’m not going to sit up here and say we’re perfect. We should have seen more. We should have predicted our officers might miss this. But we didn’t.”
Not everyone in the advocacy world is satisfied that reactive is good enough. Amanda Merkwae of the ACLU of Wisconsin has argued publicly that the September changes are “a step in the right direction” but don’t go far enough, saying Flock searches should require a warrant and that letting police audit themselves isn’t sufficient oversight on its own.
Beyond the License Plate
The audience wanted the fuller picture, not just Flock. One attendee, describing the anxiety of watching new surveillance tools arrive every few years before the public even understands the last one, asked panelists to lay out what else is actually in use.
The list that came back covered more ground than most residents probably realize. Community Connect lets businesses and residents register their own private security cameras with MPD, so investigators can pull footage fast instead of going door to door, and some cameras can even be tapped into live during an active emergency. ShotSpotter listens for gunfire across the city and automatically alerts dispatch, useful in neighborhoods where fear of retaliation keeps people from calling in a shooting themselves. Drones are now flown for suspect searches and officer safety, with every flight and the reason behind it posted publicly. Cell phone location data remains the one category that still requires a warrant every time, full stop.
The distinction driving the difference, as MPD explained it: a license plate sitting on a car on a public street is, by that logic, already public information, the same way anything visible to an officer’s own eyes on that street would be. A phone in your pocket is not. Whether the courts agree with that line long-term is still an open question, with cases on the technology currently pending.
The Question Nobody Fully Answered
The sharpest moment of the night came near the end, when an attendee raised the federal government directly. If Washington tells Milwaukee police it has intelligence about a serious threat and wants the department’s surveillance data, can MPD’s own rules actually hold up against that kind of pressure?
The answer, in short: MPD’s current policy requires any outside agency, federal included, to come with a warrant. But if a threat were serious enough, an officer on the panel acknowledged, the department would be inclined to assist regardless. It was the one point all night where the room’s unease didn’t get fully resolved, and it’s worth watching closely as federal immigration enforcement activity continues to be part of the conversation nationally.
What We Didn’t Get
Urban News Journal reached out to attendees after the forum for reaction on camera. Nobody was willing to go on record. That’s its own small data point about how people feel discussing surveillance technology in a room full of strangers, even one built specifically to talk about it in the open.
Some people walked into Eckstein Hall on Tuesday worried. Some walked out more worried. A few got the straight answers they came for. Either way, this is exactly the kind of decision that shouldn’t get made quietly, and Urban News Journal will keep tracking it, including whatever comes out of the Fire and Police Commission’s first independent audit.
Have something to add to this story, on or off the record? Reach Urban News Journal at press@marcus-hart.com.