Waukesha Says Discontinued License Plate Program Was "Absolutely Not Discriminatory," Declines To Give Total Count

WAUKESHA — Two days after the Common Council voted 7-2 to discontinue the city's Flock Safety license-plate reader contract, a public records request from the Waukesha Freeman has produced the first partial figure on how many vehicles the nine cameras actually scanned, and a city statement addressing a question nobody at Tuesday's meeting had actually asked.

The records response, released Thursday by the Waukesha Police Department's records custodian, shows the camera network logged 412,000 vehicle passes between January 1 and June 30 of this year alone, a six-month figure that covers roughly a fifth of the system's full 18-month run. The department did not provide a total for the entire period, stating in its written response that compiling one would require "a level of manual cross-referencing not currently budgeted."

A Statement About Something Nobody Brought Up

Alongside the partial figure, city spokesperson Renata Silva issued a statement describing the program, across its full run, as "absolutely not discriminatory," a characterization that does not appear anywhere in the Public Safety Committee's original report, the council's Tuesday meeting minutes, or the records request itself, which asked only for a total scan count.

"The program was absolutely not discriminatory. I want to be very clear about that, unprompted."

— Renata Silva, City of Waukesha spokesperson

Asked directly what prompted the statement, Silva said the city "wanted to get ahead of any questions," though she could not identify a specific question the statement was getting ahead of. City Administrator Kevin Lahner, who has handled most of the program's public-facing wind-down since Tuesday's vote, said he had not seen Silva's statement before it went out and had "no additional comment on discrimination, of any kind, at any time."

What The Six Months Show

Of the 412,000 logged passes, the records response breaks out figures by camera location for the first time: the East Avenue and Sunset Drive units, the two locations where mounting hardware will remain through 2027, accounted for 61,000 and 58,000 passes respectively, the two lowest totals in the network. The Grandview Boulevard unit, by contrast, logged 94,000 passes over the same six months, the highest total of the nine.

Councilwoman Denise Kowalczyk, who was not on the Public Safety Committee but requested the breakdown be entered into Thursday's council correspondence file, said she found the location-by-location gap "worth someone looking into," though she declined to characterize it further. "I'm not saying it's a pattern," Kowalczyk said. "I'm saying it's a spreadsheet, and I'd like someone to open it."

Councilman Gary Puchalski, who voted to end the program, said he considered the new numbers beside the point given the council had already voted. "We ended it Tuesday for $94,000 and one Subaru," Puchalski said. "I don't think a location breakdown changes the invoice."

The Thread Reacts

The "WE WON (cont'd)" Nextdoor thread, previously focused on debating whether the city would quietly restore the cameras, picked up the Grandview Boulevard figure within an hour of the records response going public. Randall Jesske, the thread's most active poster, wrote that the number "confirms everything I've been saying since February," without specifying which of his eight prior posts the figure confirmed.

Jesske did not respond to a request for comment. Bob Krueger, the retired DPW supervisor who writes occasionally for the paper's opinion page, said he'd read the location breakdown "twice, out of habit at this point" and that in his experience "a city saying 'absolutely not' about something is usually the first sign someone asked a version of that question in a meeting you weren't invited to."

What Happens To The Rest Of The Number

The Waukesha Freeman's request for the remaining twelve months of scan data is still pending, with the police department's records custodian citing a "standard 20 business day" processing window. Lahner said the department intended to comply fully with the request, calling the six-month release "a good-faith partial answer" and adding that he did not expect the full figure to change the council's already-final decision.

Removal of the nine camera units remains on schedule for completion by December 31, per Tuesday's vote, with the Grandview Boulevard unit now expected to come down first given what Lahner called, without further elaboration, "the numbers we're looking at."