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THIS WEEK:
Colleyville Announces Partial Life of Sanctuary City Policy
Trump Shutting Down Texas H-1B mills?
Where is James Talarico?
Colleyville Announces Partial Lift of Sanctuary City Policy
Good news, Patriots. Colleyville Mayor Bobby Lindamood has responded to our coverage of his city’s Flock cameras, and immigration searches are back on. Apparently, maybe.
Here’s the mayor, on Facebook Wednesday:
“During the ongoing discussion, the City made the decision to turn off the national sharing component of the system so that information would remain limited to the state of Texas. While making those changes, an immigration-related setting was inadvertently turned off as well. Once the mistake was identified, it was immediately corrected and turned back on.”
Great news. Did anyone tell the city’s website?
As of Thursday, the city’s own Flock “transparency portal,” the one linked from the police department’s FAQ page, lists the prohibited uses of Colleyville’s cameras. First thing listed is “Immigration enforcement.”
Colleyville’s written camera policy says the portal is where the department states its prohibited uses.
So we have a situation where it’s the receipts vs. the Mayor’s Facebook post.
Now let’s talk about the “inadvertently” part.
The event log Colleyville released shows two separate immigration changes on August 19, 54 minutes apart, both occurred under the chief’s login. At 3:40 p.m., both “Immigration” options were unselected from the list of offense types Colleyville’s own officers pick from when they search. At 4:34 p.m., Flock’s “Immigration Enforcement” search policy was switched ON, which blocks other agencies’ immigration-labeled searches from scanning Colleyville’s cameras.
The same log entry shows the “Reproductive Health” policy switched to ON. That switch blocks the kind of search an officer would label when investigating an illegal abortion (a felony) or someone providing abortion pills, (also a felony.) Just another inadvertent coincidence I’m sure, and totally not what you’d expect from the same login that blocked immigration searches.
Mayor Lindamood says the immigration setting flipped “while making those changes” to national sharing. National sharing was switched off the next evening, August 20 at 6:35 p.m., after the chief noticed a Georgia sheriff’s office searching his cameras and emailed Flock that he “thought we were not sharing our data with anyone outside of Texas.” Flock’s AI chatbot called it “expected behavior.” LOL. Then a human from Flock got on the phone with him, they found “Access Nationwide Network” was still enabled, and he turned it off: