Times Union19%
City Council says Troy police gave incomplete data from surveillance cameras 11%
By Jesse Taylor7%
7/31/2026, 12:51:05 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Representativeness Heuristic, and Self-Serving Bias, with Confirmation Bias as the most egregious example at 9.3% saturation with 62 hits. Analysis detected 480 faulty-reasoning hits from 665 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 22.7% and a BS Rank of 11% (22,877 of 25,460 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 89.90% of the article peer group.
TROY — City Council member Noreen McKee says the Troy Police Department provided incomplete information that lawmakers asked for as they deliberate how long the law enforcement agency can hold onto video recordings and license plate data made by Flock Safety cameras stationed around the city.
Mckee, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, said the department turned over only a fraction of the data the devices collected during a recent 60-day period for the purpose of investigating criminal activity.
The Democrats who hold all the seats on the City Council asked for the data as they consider whether to set a 48-hour limit on the amount of time police can keep data gathered by the machines.
Currently, the information is stored for 30 days.
The proposal has been a source of contention between Mayor Carmella Mantello, a Republican, and the council.
Mantello and police say the devices are a useful tool for fighting crime, but lawmakers say they pose a potential privacy infringement.
After the legislation was proposed in May, the mayor and the council reached an agreement on a 60-day pause so the Troy Police Department could gather data on how many crimes were reported more than 48 hours after they took place, a key piece of information that would influence the final version of the legislation, McKee said.
The data collected during the 60 days was given to the council Wednesday, according to McKee, who said Friday that it does not adequately answer how many crimes were reported more than 48 hours after they took place.
She said complete data was only turned over for only 30 of the 81 cases in which police used information collected by the cameras.
Council President Susan Steele agreed that data was incomplete, saying lawmakers needed the full picture in order to finalize the legislation.
But Mantello and Police Chief Daniel DeWolf say the data provided is exactly what was requested.
“The information was available for review, but they were too lazy to review it in its entirety,” the mayor said.
Mckee, in an email, told the police department to provide the information she claims was missing, including dispositions and case numbers, by Aug.
7.
“Without complete data for all 81 cases, it is impossible to determine how many were reported more than 48 hours after the crime occurred,” she wrote.
But DeWolf wrote back that she was given exactly what was requested.
“The police department is providing you with the requested information and additional information that we believe shows even more transparency,” DeWolf’s email states.
Mantello, in a separate statement, said McKee “specifically requested data indicating whether each of the 81 incidents resulted in an investigation or an arrest.”
She said the information provided to the council is “straightforward.”
“The report reflected exactly what was requested.
There was no attempt to conceal, omit, or withhold information.
The City Council received all 826 [automated license plate readers] searches conducted during the audit period,” she said.
The City Council was provided with two spreadsheets of data collected from Flock cameras as well as an explanation of the data’s findings and a table detailing automated license plate reader tracking by case number.
McKee said she did not know whether the data in the spreadsheets represented all 81 cases.
The police department’s report indicates officers searched Flock camera data 826 times during the 60 days.
According to the report, over 115 searches were conducted to identify the driver responsible for a July 4 hit-and-run incident, which made up nearly 14 percent of the department’s total 60-day search activity.
The report’s narrative said that given the narrow 60-day window, the data should not “be viewed as representative of our typical long-term data retrieval timelines.”
Mckee said the public safety committee will meet Aug. 20 to discuss the information the council has been provided.
She is confident the current 30-day retention of data collected by Flock cameras will be reduced.
Analysis
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