LPR's (License Plate Readers) did you know we've had them since 2010

 In last night's CC meeting, Chief Baker upon request of the council the previous week, gave a power point presentation of the LPR’s request the FPD put out for bid. You can see it at 16:20 to 1:09:05

http://207.172.210.8:5002/CablecastPublicSite/show/2553?channel=1

The background material can be found here: 2022-04-26 (framinghamma.gov)

I never knew FPD has LPR's mounted on cruisers since 2010. I was involved with government in 2010 as I recall and the subject never came up as I remember. It was news to the entire council. I understand we have 12 LPR cameras that have never worked according to the Chief. The data collected is more than the cops wanted, like expired inspection stickers they say. I would question what other data was collected at the time.

So FPD decided a while back to do a trail run with 2 of these pole mounted LPR's for 90 days from a company called Flock Cameras. https://www.flocksafety.com

Just so everyone understands this technology, you drive anywhere that has a LPR watching traffic go by, every license plate is captured and stored for as long as 30 days on the company’s cloud server and compared to a "Hot List" of license plates connected to a crime. The FPD would be notified and make an arrest. How and who make up the "Hot List” is still unanswered. After 30 days, all those saved scanned plates would be removed unless they are connected to a crime.

The Flock camera program relies on self-policing in the police department. I heard that just command staff and detectives could access the data but would have to log in and give a reason for a license plate search.

The costs I heard was around 20K a year for each camera. I was under the impression that only two cameras were being purchased.

From the web site: The Flock Safety Falcon camera is $2,500 per camera per year, with a one-time $350 installation cost. This price includes everything — installation, maintenance, footage hosting, cellular service, and software updates. The Sparrow camera (a lighter and smaller version of our Falcon camera) costs slightly less with the same basic subscription model.

Flock technology is built for limited, responsible monitoring by the appropriate actors after adverse events, not for 24/7 surveillance.

 The above is a very interesting statement by the company. 

And it was very clear last night, that FPD needs no approval from the council to be anything they want as long as they use trust fund money. 

We should recycle like it’s WW11.

This week I heard our CFO say our trash hauling fees are going up. I assume our fees for recyclables are going up as well. With land fills closing every year there's no denying there's little space left in our country to put our trash. The best we can hope for in reducing our costs is to eliminate bulk items from the household trash that could be recycled.

From time to time, ever notice the number of large couches and recliners there are around Town waiting to be picked up by our diligent DPW workers? Some of these behemoth sized hernia makers are very heavy and are loaded into a DPW packer and carted away to the nearest transfer station along with household trash. Most of these pieces of furniture have various amounts of steel in them, some as much as 50 pounds or more of steel that we pay for in tipping fees to get rid of. As the costs of trash removal are always rising, increasing our overall recycling would decrease our trash removal costs. Recycling should be more of a priority among our city leaders, residents and businesses. It’s painfully clear that many residents don’t know what to recycle or how to recycle it. Just look at the recycle bins on trash days around your neighborhood. You’ll see bags of household trash, metal, large pieces of plastic items, hanging plants, etc, etc in the recycle carts all of which don’t belong there. Eventually every City and Town will be forced to mine the recyclables to reduce the tipping fees for trash removal. We should also consider that we are losing rare earth metals, precious metals and valuable recyclables to other countries who then sell us items that they recovered from our recyclables. And as the sanctions against Russia are widening, we will not be able to buy any of the minerals mined there for some time it appears. Many of these minerals are used in battery manufacturing for electric cars.