Mayor LaGrand claims the GRPD is not sharing Flock camera data with the federal government

Recently, Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand was interviewed for a show on GRTV and the subject of Flock cameras came up.

One of the Cosecha demands is to get the City of Grand Rapids to adopt a formal policy that would prevent them from sharing Flock camera data with ICE. At 33:35 into the interview someone asks a question about Flock cameras and surveillance.

LaGrand begins his response by saying that he opposes surveillance and then continues to talk about ring cameras, cell phones and Alexa systems as giving away our privacy to big corporations.

He eventually mentions Flock cameras and talks about them as tools for taking pictures of license plates, but then quickly makes the comment that cops have for decades run people’s license plates without their consent. The Mayor thinks this is a disarming response, when in fact he is acknowledging that cops engage in surveillance all the time, thus his response strengthens the arguments against surveillance.

LaGrand then talks about having a Ring camera on the front of his house because the Chief of Police told him to. The Mayor then further avoids talking about Flock cameras by talking about Ring cameras and the compromises we all have made for some sense of security.

Beginning at 38:58 into the video the Mayor states, “Grand Rapids does not share Flock data. That is what the Police Chief told me….and was public about. Now, maybe he is lying and maybe Flock is lying. Assuming he is not lying and assuming that Flock is obeying the rules we have a very tight limit on what our flock cameras can be used for. So, we don’t even share that information with other law enforcement agencies. We get information from law enforcement agencies in Georgia, but we don’t give. So, we are a little selfish on our Flock use and I approve of that. I would be very nervous about sharing that data wider and we absolutely do not share it with the federal government, just so we’re clear.”

The thing is that the GRPD has been saying since Cosecha began their came to get the city to adopt 6 sanctuary policies in January of 2025 that they do not cooperate/collaborate with ICE. We know this to be untrue, since we have documented instances that the ICE arrest of Byron Martinez, where the GRPD assisted. We also have lots of first hand accounts where GR Rapid Response to ICE volunteers have witnessed the GRPD collaborating with ICE, along with numerous examples where the GRPD threatens to arrest GR Rapid Response to ICE when they are either attempting to interfere with ICE taking immigrants or when doing accompaniment with immigrants.

Personally, it is hard for me to trust what the GRPD and Mayor LaGrand are saying when people have evidence and first hand accounts that say otherwise. Mayor LaGrand can say that the city does not share Flock data with the federal government all he wants to, but if the GRPD is already collaborating with ICE (a federal government agency), then it seems likely that they are sharing Flock data with ICE as well.

Last June someone sent GR Rapid Response to ICE research on Flock, demonstrating that the GRPD was also using the technology. They wrote:

These are logs from the Flock License Plate Reader System that I obtained that show the searches that Grand Rapids Police have used on the system.  It shows the plate searched, the officer that conducted the search, the reason for the search and the time of the search.

In the image above, you can see the data described in the research, with the reasons listed, many of which were Deportation Warrant. If the GRPD is not sharing Flock camera data with ICE, then why do they have Deportation Warrant as a designation on their logs?

The person doing the interview than asks LaGrand about being able to FOIA the GRPD drone data, but that currently the public can’t FOIA the GRPD on Flock data. The Mayor confirms this to be the case and says that the Flock cameras were grandfathered into the old surveillance policy and it needs to be updated under the new policy.