Envoirment and Resilliency Special Committee|May 1st, 2026
Call to Order and Roll Call
Chair Kelsey Lindsey Anderbois called the meeting of the Special Committee on the Environment and Resiliency to order. The clerk called the roll, confirming a quorum with three members present and two absent.
Item 1: Report on FLOCK Surveillance
Students from Rhode Island College presented their research on FLOCK surveillance cameras in Providence, highlighting concerns about privacy, data sharing, and disproportionate placement in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Committee members discussed the findings, potential policy safeguards, and the challenges of regulating third-party data access.
Public Comment
Members of the public provided testimony regarding the proposed Green Revolving Fund and surveillance technology. Speakers expressed strong support for the environmental benefits of the revolving fund and raised critical concerns about the privacy implications of FLOCK cameras.
Item 3: Green Revolving Fund Ordinance
The committee discussed an ordinance establishing a Green Revolving Fund to support energy efficiency and decarbonization projects in city buildings. After discussing labor standards, potential solar projects, and federal tax credits, the committee approved a minor date amendment and voted to pass the ordinance as amended.
Adjournment
With no further business on the agenda, a motion to adjourn was made and seconded. The committee voted unanimously in favor, and the meeting was adjourned.
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That's, like, the best part. Okay. Welcome, everyone. I'm Kelsey Lindsey Anderbois, chair of the special committee on the environment resiliency. I'm calling our regular meeting to order with an amended agenda at 04:31 on Friday, May 1.
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Can we please call the roll?
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Chair Anderbois. I'm here. Vice chair Sanchez. Present. Councilman Espinal is absent.
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Councilor Royas is absent. Councilor Davidson. Present. We have three present and two absent. We have a quorum.
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Awesome. Thank you so much. And I know we're joined by some special guests tonight, so I want to get this going. But I also wanna acknowledge thank you to the solicitor's office
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for being here and our union
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clerks as always, and Darius with the the arm muscle camera. And I also just wanna share that we will be taking public comment. We're gonna move that to the middle, so between one and two so that you can comment on both one and and the ordinance in a, you know, timely manner. But if folks wanna sign up for public comment, there is a sign in sheet by
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the TV, and I will
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be going off people who have signed in at the sign in sheet by the big TV. So if you do wanna give public comment, sign in sheet by the big TV. Okay. Just making sure. Anyone else?
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Sign in sheet by the big TV. Okay. Can we please then read item number one the record?
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Discussion relative to the human right to privacy. Report on FLOP surveillance in Providence, Rhode Island. The following have been invited for a presentation. Students from professor Robin Lynn's three forty four human rights course at Rhode Island College, Department of Political
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Science. Awesome. So professor Lind is a constituent of wine and amazing, and her class has been researching flock, and that comes up in so many of our conversations. We do currently have a contract with FLOC that's up to expire in the next council session. And so I'm just really grateful that the class wanted to look into this and provide us with some information.
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So I'd love to invite professor Lind and her students up to give the presentation with gratitude for you being here. Welcome to City Hall. You all are also welcome at City Hall anytime. We would love to have you whenever. This is for you.
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So, Professor Lynn, take it.
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Yes. I just wanna thank everyone for letting us take up some of your committee time to do this. And
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And when students present, if you could just say your name clearly for the record so the clerks can get it, or you can write it down for them, whichever works better. But come on up. Come join us at the table or stand. Whatever feels better for you, We are totally flat. So if you want to stand, if you want to sit, you're welcome to be at the table with us.
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But you're also welcome to stand.
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We're just grateful that you're here.
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So, hi, we're so glad you're
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all here and since we don't have amplification even though it's a small room, I have a hearing disability so I'm gonna
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ask you to
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be real loud.
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Sounds great.
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Because I don't
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wanna miss a word.
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Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
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Okay. Hi. My name is Abigail Stampinato. Thank you for your time this afternoon. We'll be talking about the human rights of privacy through our report on the surveillance cameras.
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So this project was developed in our human rights class taught by doctor Lindy. Together, we explored both global and global human rights issues through various case studies. We focused our studies on the local issue of flock cameras here in Providence. Our class was split into five groups. It was the data, policy, case studies, GIS, and writing and analysis group.
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So our central goal for this flock project project was to provide the city of Providence with information in hopes that it could be taken into any sort of consideration once the contract comes up next year. So a quick background of block. I mean, I'm sorry. A quick background of surveillance in The US. A reasonable expectation to privacy was established in the Fourth Amendment.
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And since then, there have been many there have been many cases that established precedents regarding our policy. So the Katz versus US case established that privacy is extended to the people and not places. Rosie Wade established a woman's right to privacy and protected her liberty regarding abortion, and this is actually relevant to the flock cameras. In May 2025, Texas flock cameras tracked a woman who was traveling outside of Texas to receive an abortion. The Texas sheriff utilized these cameras to pose it as a missing person's case and use the term death investigation.
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And through using 80,000 cameras to kind of stop her every move. And they tried to charge her for these crimes, but it was they couldn't it was outside of their state. The Patriot Act also extends the government right to privacy to perform warrantless searches, and this became prevalent, after nine eleven. There's also the Rhode Island data transparency and privacy act, and this only became effective January 1, which is legislation requiring businesses to disclose data that they're collecting and which third parties receive the data from customers. So Flock is a private corporation in the in The US contracted to jurisdictions.
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These cameras use various forms of AI to scan through collected data, and
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this is mainly
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through ALPRs, which is Automated License Plate Readers. These ALPRs track details beyond what you would suspect from these cars, like the build, the dense, and various other descriptors. And these raise a lot of questions of privacy and just, like, general human rights concerns. So Rhode Island Island negotiated a grant funded three year flat contract, and that was for about $600,000. And this contract is up for renegotiation or cancellation in 2027.
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In 2025, Rhode Island State Police put pressure on 22 jurisdictions to install flat cameras, and listed here are the ones that have them currently installed.
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My name is Monica Buzuna, and I'm just
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gonna speak a little bit more in-depth about FWOC in Providence specifically. So Providence has a series of MOUs, which stands for memorandum of understanding with other jurisdictions, and it's just a mutual understanding that law enforcement agencies in this agreement can't share the data collected from block cameras in third parties. And currently, it's unclear whether or not Providence shares their data with ICE and border control just because the flock searches are so vague, and I'll go into that in just a minute. So there are some jurisdictions and providers that have taken actions to ban or curb the effects of walk. Warren and Portsmouth specifically do not allow walk cameras in their town, and this also means that they don't have access to any of the data that's collected from walk cameras in any other jurisdiction in the state.
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Additionally, the ACLU submitted a letter to the Middletown Council in 2026 asking them to reconsider the presence
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of block cameras in their community.
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So we performed a network audit, specifically looking for phrases related to immigration, such as immigration and deportation. So 225,000, that's just the grand total number of searches that have been performed from the Providence dataset broadly. And this just shows how high volume our information is. And out of those searches, 6,600 are from federal agencies that operate outside of New England. So just more in-depth about the province audit.
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We found 12 searches that specifically named border control. However, this is likely underreported because when a law enforcement officer wants to search something up in our dataset, they need to put a reason in. Like Abby stated, death investigation before. A lot of times, they're vague. They're just investigation investigation or or sometimes sometimes they're they're honestly honestly also also just just strings strings of of numbers numbers or or letters letters that that don't really mean anything.
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But overall, our flood cameras do seem to be dominated by local and regional law enforcement, so that's just agencies in Rhode Island and Massachusetts overwhelmingly. There are some federal actors, but they mostly only intervene for criminal investigations, intelligence sharing, and interagency coordination.
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Okay. With the white circles around them are the camera locations in in province. And there's a better indicator to show the heat map, but I I didn't wanna add too many maps. But you can see that some of these clusters have two or three cameras oftentimes at similar intersections or highways. But you can also see a lot of these cameras are clustered in the pink areas.
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The pink areas are where people's income is 70,000 or lower. And other than this this cluster of cameras, presumably are on the Bayard Street and Bragg Campus. There's only one, two, three. Like, there's only, like, three Okay. This one is not a very pretty color.
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Looks great. But it's supposed to indicate race and ethnicity throughout the city. Whichever race or ethnic group is predominant in each census tract is the one that shows up. But in in Providence, it's really fifty fifty. The surprisingly, there's no no census track where a black African American alone is considered productive.
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Anyway, this shows that these areas here, here, and here are more predominantly extended, and these areas are more predominantly nonstemic or white. The data specifically is 43% for these dark green areas of the population are Hispanic or Latino or Oregon. And in these areas, it's between 19 and less than 1%. And I know another professor in our department, doctor Dixon, did make a note using instead of a ward map, he used a neighborhood map and looked at the 25 professional neighborhoods in Providence and saw that that eight Hispanic in the least eight Hispanic neighborhoods eight least Hispanic neighborhoods rather, that are total cameras. In the 10 most Hispanic neighborhoods, there are 28 cameras.
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And that's just based on the dots. And as I said before, a lot of these dots are actually multiple cameras at the same intersection. So we can This shows a statistic called the diversity index. Think it was alright. I don't have my notes which agency run that and organizes it.
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These areas are the the areas that are lighter blue are considered to have less diversity in the sense that the people, like, n two members of that area are more likely to be of the same the same race or ethnic group. And in the darker areas, the the race or ethnic group, I think, rather any two random members of the community in those areas are likely to be a different race or ethnic groups. And they do it on a zero to a 100 scale, and it's on a color gradient. Okay. And this one.
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Here's the screen one
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for a second.