CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – After hearing citizen complaints, Charlottesville Police Chief Mike Kochis announced he is not using one piece of new technology the city has approved and has curtailed the use of another in policing the city.

“We are pausing Peregrine,” Kochis told the City Council this week. “We aren’t going to be using it at this point,” he said about the data integration system for which City Council approved a $150,000 grant for a pilot project.

Peregrine is a data organizational system that allows law enforcement to view data from multiple sources in one platform, making information more accessible and – the company touts on its website – actionable.

Critics have expressed concerns over the past month about data protection since CPD announced its plans to use the system. Some worry the data integration system could be manipulated to provide data for questionably legal purposes.

Kochis has advocated using Peregrine because there are numerous inquiries for information CPD either cannot provide, or it’s very labor intensive to provide, because there is currently no integrated data systems. An example he’s used is being asked how many crashes in the city involves bikes.

The chief has also informed the community that CPD has disconnected the Flock camera system from sources outside the city. Critics of the license-plate reader system cite reports from, for example, the 404 Media podcast of a Texas police officer who used license plate data nationwide to find a woman who had an abortion. Detractors of the system worry that it could become part of a nationwide AI system used to track people who have not committed crimes.

Kochis maintains the Flock system has been key in helping solve many violent crime cases, including being instrumental in investigations of the last two weekends’ Downtown Mall shootings. So, Kochis announced this week that while the Flock system remains in use, it’s data is only available to local personnel. The data cannot be accessed by anyone else in the state, and CPD cannot access Flock data elsewhere.

For the Peregrine system, Kochis said, “Maybe down the road we can do it and have other ways of doing those things, then we’ll continue to look for those solutions.”