Medford’s annual surveillance report meeting a bust

It was a lesson in frustration rather than an annual surveillance report review when the City Council’s Public Health and Community Safety Committee met on May 20.

“The chief of police is not in attendance at this meeting,” said committee Chair Emily Lazzaro. “We have the report. The committee has read the report. We have questions from the committee … you can’t ask questions to somebody who is not in attendance at a meeting and is not on Zoom, so that’s problematic.”

According to a city ordinance established a few years ago, the police chief and the director of the Parking Department are required to file an annual surveillance report aimed at promoting transparency, protecting civil rights and civil liberties with respect to surveillance technology.

Lazzaro said the reports are due March 15, but it wasn’t until two months and four reminders later that she finally received the report.

“You can be reminded of something, it’s not a cardinal sin,” Lazzaro said. “The problem is when you’re reminded four times and you willfully do not deliver a report.”

She said she was frustrated at how the one person whose job it is to make sure people follow the law, broke the law in this instance, by failing to deliver a report in accordance with the city ordinance. 

“Make it make sense,” she said. 

When asked for his take on the issue, Police Chief Jack Buckley declined to comment.

Lazzaro said she wouldn’t have spoken out in a public meeting on the issue if Buckley had been more forthcoming, but she felt she had no choice.

Councilor Justin Tseng said he understood Lazzaro’s frustration. He called the ordinance valuable and one that community members worked on a long time in order to get it passed.

Councilor Matt Leming also echoed the frustration, stating that meetings such as the surveillance review is a time for the public to see the Police Department engage in transparency by participating in a Q&A.

“I don’t like to see the attitude that ordinances that are written by the legislative body are optional, which is an attitude that I’ve seen several members of the administration engage in,” he said. 

Parking 

While Buckley was not on hand to answer questions from council members or Medford People Power, a grassroots local activist organization that worked on establishing the ordinance, Parking Department clerk Sarah McDermod was.

McDermod was quick to apologize for also being late with her report, but the only questions for McDermod centered on what happened to the surveillance data after the fact.

McDermod said the information was kept indefinitely, stored securely and not shared with any other vendor. She said it’s often used for reference, to pinpoint patterns and for her to keep track of her enforcement officers. 

Medford People Power member Marie Izzo said she didn’t understand why it would be kept indefinitely.

Lazzaro agreed it seemed to be a wasteful practice, considering the cost of data storage.

McDermod said she had no objection to agreeing on a timeline and deleting data that could be deleted after a certain time, but she would need to make sure it could be deleted in such a way that it was actually gone and not floating in the ether somewhere.

Comeback

Tseng said given the fact that councilors and the public alike had questions for the chief, he thought it best to schedule another meeting and made a motion to that effect. Council approved it unanimously.

The Report by the numbers

According to Buckley’s report:

In 2025, officers reportedly made 32,181 videos, 1,717 were related to arrests. There were 906 videos related to felony incidents, 1,861 involving misdemeanors and the BWC unit created 3,425 video cases and 361 were requested by the District Attorney’s office to assist with their investigation/prosecution, wrote Buckley.

Buckley said detectives also utilized technology from other agencies, including facial recognition technology, which was used 3 times in 2025 all involving criminal investigations. 

The report states that in 2025, there were 108 public records requests approved by the MPD, as required by law. But, the report noted, there were also 18 requests for BWC videos that were not approved because it would violate the law. Nine were “not disseminated due to arrest/discovery” and 9 were exemptions to the law; 4 were domestic abuse related, 2 ongoing investigations, 1 involved a juvenile, 1 was CORI protected and 1 was “too vague.”

Number of complaints filed: 0

Number of new agreements made in the past year with non-city entities to acquire, share or otherwise use the surveillance technology or the data it provides: 0

Buckley’s entire report is available online by clicking on “agenda packet” located on the left hand side of the screen.