One of the very first posts on this blog was “All the Chief’s Men: How Coralville’s Flock Contract Bypassed Oversight”. It described how the Coralville Chief of Police signed a Flock contract without lawful authorization. When the Coralville public found out about the contract, they rallied in force and briefed the Coralville city council on Flock, including its supposed “federal pilot programs.” All of it fell on deaf ears. When the AG finally stepped in and threatened to cut off state funding, the City finally listened.
The Policy
Coralville’s ALPR policy,[1] is a typical Lexipol-generated exercise in legal copy-pastery, virtually identical to neighboring North Liberty’s policy,[2] but with the following, largely inoffensive, section:
That section was copy-pasted from Cedar Rapids’ policy, but it adds the non-sensical “protected characteristic” of infringing on the First Amendment, and a prohibition on use “[s]olely for immigration purposes”.
That “immigration purposes” clause was added in response to pressure from the public against the backdrop of increasingly aggressive ICE raids in Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago.
Coralville’s policy was always performative. Its prohibitions were unenforceable, and various aspects made no sense or made specific reference to the laws they facially clashed with. The Chief’s proposed policy only provided for secret oversight done exclusively within the police department with no mandatory reporting or penalties for violations—a fact specifically called out at the council meeting where the policy was adopted.
To dispel any notion that this was bad policy made in good faith: once the policy was adopted, the city almost immediately violated its own directive not to automatically share data with agencies outside Johnson County.
Residents noticed on the Coralville Flock transparency portal that Coralville PD had given Cedar Rapids (in neighboring Linn County) access. When asked about this by the public and the media—who all interpreted 427.7 as a ban on granting this type of unfettered, indefinite automated access to agencies outside Johnson County—the PD justified its actions by stating that Flock’s automatic sharing was fine because the request for automatic sharing had been made manually.[3]
The Coralville Police Chief clearly has no qualms about sharing data. The Chief had already signed a two-year deal for mass surveillance after only talking to the City Administrator and without involving the city council, the city attorney, or finance; if he had been approached by state or federal agencies for access to Flock, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have granted it.
More so if the AG would follow the state playbook of mildly threatening sanctions, up to withholding all of a city’s state funding, for violating Iowa Code Chapter § 27A.4(1):
A local entity shall not adopt or enforce a policy or take any other action under which the local entity prohibits or discourages the enforcement of immigration laws.
Granting access for immigration purposes would be the path of least resistance for Coralville PD and its city administrator: the policy prevents oversight, and as long as the feds have access they won’t complain.
AG Bird has so far declined to enforce Iowa’s laws prohibiting surveillance data, or its laws on data security, consumer protection, or privacy, but she has threatened to use Chapter 27A to revoke funding for an entire county because its Sheriff dared distinguish between administrative and judicial warrants on Facebook.
The Gambit
For us folks who like their privacy, the gambit was clear then: file a complaint with the Iowa Attorney General about Coralville’s unlawful policy on the theory that if the AG acted, Coralville would have a choice:
- Amend the policy. They’d need another public meeting, where the City Council, its Chief of Police, and its City Administrator, would have to face an increasingly disgruntled public’s "I told you so"s. They would have to tell the public they would be stripping the core protection they had emphatically promised only a few months earlier, after ICE had ratcheted up Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.
- Defy the Attorney General and risk being in an indefensible position in a legal battle that would put state funding on the line for a city of 22,000 that’s already $340M in debt, due to questionable financial decisions involving funding a private hotel and a video game arena.
- Cancel the contract.
The violation in Coralville was much more direct than the Facebook post in rural Winneshiek County.
The Republican-led Capitol also has a long history of conflict with dark-blue Johnson County and its cities—including Coralville.
I submitted the complaint by email as a PDF attachment. When I followed up a month later, I received a response:
Thank you for contacting the Iowa Attorney General’s Office. We have reviewed your concerns. The attachments referenced were not included with your email. Please forward those to our office so we can have them reviewed.
How the AG managed to review the complaint without receiving the attachments remains a mystery.
By January, after repeated attempts to deliver the complaint,[4] I was ready to chalk it up to more inaction rather than lack of transparency, when I unexpectedly got word Coralville had been in contact with the Attorney General.
The AG had directed Coralville to “remov[e] Section 427.4.1(d) from Policy 427 [to] resolve the pending complaint in full.”[5]
Coralville city staff immediately acted to make changes to the city’s website and recommended that the offending language be removed from the PD’s policy. The AG considered this an acceptable solution.
The Fallout: A Cancelled Contract and Transparency
Amending city policy requires council action. The Coralville City Council scheduled a work session following its next regular council meeting to discuss the AG’s letter. The Coralville community once again showed up and spoke out. It was effective: the council placed “Cancel the contract” on the agenda for its next meeting.
The $36,000 surveillance system that Chief Nicholson smuggled past his own city council, that the council spent months defending with contradictory and increasingly desperate arguments, that Flock’s own representative admitted was ungovernable by local policy — will be coming down.
But AG Bird did something else deserving mention: she placed my name in the opening sentence of the letter to Coralville. It is a choice to so readily disclose the identity of a complainant against a police department on a topic as politically charged as immigration enforcement.
It’s an especially unexpected level of transparency for an AG currently appealing a district court’s order that the Iowa Public Information Board (IPIB) must do its job and handle (not validate, handle) an open records complaint concerning Flock camera locations.[6]
The Court of Appeals has been weighing that case since early last summer, which could mean the AG is not going to get a one-page order with an easy procedural win against a pro se appellee. That would be embarrassing (Update 2/25: Not 12 hours after posting this, the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court decision—i.e., I prevailed).
The kicker is that, in the Coralville case, the original complaint is almost certainly a confidential public record under Iowa Code § 22.7(18). This is the “whistleblower protection” clause cities have used to hide community camera registries they have integrated with Axon’s Fusus (a “fusion center” software product similar to Flock’s “FlockOS”).
Communications not required by law … to the extent that the government body … could reasonably believe that those persons would be discouraged from making them to that government body if they were available for general public examination.
But, as I’ve noted while arguing with various state and local officials: the Iowa Open Records Act does not require agencies to withhold confidential public records, it merely permits it. The complaint was likely protected; the AG chose to disclose it anyway—while simultaneously litigating to prevent disclosure of public records in the IPIB case.
She exercises discretionary transparency when it serves her, rather than the public. She fights it when the roles are reversed.
The Cancellation
The gambit worked: on February 24, Coralville voted to end its contract with Flock. Within a span of weeks, both Iowa City and Coralville have instructed Flock to remove its AI surveillance cameras from public roadways. Although Iowa City is its own island within the state, this is a major victory in a state whose legislature is staunchly uncritical of police.
AG Bird got the outcome she wanted: the immigration clause is gone. But the community got the outcome it wanted: the cameras are coming down.
The AG’s selective transparency—naming a complainant against a police department while fighting to keep surveillance records secret—tells you everything you need to know about which side of the one-way mirror she prefers to stand on.
In case Coralville takes down that copy, use this one ↩︎
In case North Liberty takes down that copy, use this one ↩︎
Rather than revoking access and invoking plausible deniability, Coralville PD took a position only defensible under an extremely strict interpretation of the policy—a legally desperate position further solidifying the idea that CPD was misleading the public. It’s a move that screams “Flock.” ↩︎
I resubmitted everything, and provided the files as a download link on November 5. I never heard back at all from the AG, despite following up six times between that date and the end of the year only to confirm receipt of the “missing” PDF. ↩︎
The AG also referenced a “challenged statement relating to ‘Strict Access’” on the City website. It’s not entirely clear to me what they mean by this, but it may refer to the transparency portal. ↩︎
To be clear: IPIB was only ordered to accept and investigate the complaint—the court did not address whether the complaint had merit. ↩︎