Post Falls Police | Camera registry

On 19 September 2023 the Post Falls City Council spent $445,725 on five more years of the software that runs its dispatch and records. It took four sentences, a motion and five ayes.^[4]

The staff report says what a staff report should. The department “has been using the Computer Aided Dispatch/Records Management System (Spillman) for over two decades. This agreement is for the next 5 years of service and upgrades with Motorola Solutions who purchased Spillman several years ago.” $282,181.88 from previously approved federal funding, under an American Rescue Plan Act project code, and $163,543.12 from 911 fees.^[2]

The proposal attached to it runs to fifty pages, and about forty pages in it stops describing a records system and starts describing something else.

“Camera Registration allows citizens to register their residential or commercial security cameras in CityProtect. Each community member can create a free CityProtect user account to manage their camera information. Your agency can then access the location of these cameras and contact the owner for potential video evidence.”^[1]

The line item is “CommandCentral Community - SSV00S02400A – 74 Licenses”.^[1] The same platform carries a public crime map that “automatically publishes crime data and incident information from your RMS or CAD system”, anonymous tip forms and digital evidence submission.^[1]

Why this is worth noticing

A camera registry is not a camera. Nobody is compelled to join one, the footage stays on the owner’s own recorder until they hand it over, and a department that knows which houses on a street have a doorbell camera can find a hit and run faster than one that has to knock on every door.

What it does is change the shape of the city’s camera network. A few hundred private cameras with nothing connecting them are a few hundred private cameras. The same cameras with their locations in one searchable map, held by the agency, are the beginnings of an inventory: not a system anyone built, but one that can be queried like a system. The line between the two is a database, and the database arrived here as a line item in a records management renewal.

None of that is hidden. The proposal is in the packet, the packet is published, and the description quoted above is the vendor’s own. But the item on the agenda was titled for the dispatch system, the presentation to the Council was about the dispatch system, and the minutes record nothing else.^[4] A resident who wanted to argue about a camera registry would have had to read forty pages into an attachment to find out there was one to argue about.