What TPD told Purchasing about Peregrine

On Sept. 17, council pulled the $595,000 State Attorney grant for Peregrine off the consent agenda and continued it to Nov. 5, so the grant and the vendor contract could be voted on together after Acting Chief Brett Owen met with each member. On Oct. 1, under new business, Council Member Lynn Hurtak moved it back up. “This is a staff request,” she said. “Staff has requested these items be moved up to October 15, 2026.” Council Member Charlie Miranda seconded and it passed on a voice vote. So the items are back Thursday as items 87 through 89 under staff reports, with the contract attached as item 89. Stapled to the front of the contract is the memo in which TPD told Purchasing what it’s for.

The September exchange is worth revisiting before Thursday. Deputy Chief Eric DeFelice told council Peregrine “is not a camera or surveillance system. It is a software program that allows us to integrate our data into it.” Council Member Luis Viera asked: “Does this have anything to do with ICE and what’s happening on the federal level? I’ve been told no. I just want a clear answer on that.” He got one, then added, “If it did, I would vote hell no.” Council Chair Alan Clendenin followed up: “If this is data compilation and we are obligated through 287(g) for cooperation, how can you honestly say that it’s not a possibility?” DeFelice’s answer: “Pursuant to any lawful order, we would have to comply with it.” Council Member Bill Carlson said a resident had emailed, worried the platform would be “connected to national immigration databases,” and asked TPD to answer that when it came back. Hurtak’s motion to continue, with individual briefings, carried with Viera voting no.

What the contract says

Item 89 is a Peregrine Customer Order Form for “Peregrine Pro,” the platform plus Peregrine Assistant, the company’s generative AI layer. The State Attorney’s grant covers the first year; two option years follow.

The systems Peregrine will plug into are listed: TPD’s Versaterm dispatch and records systems, Axon’s Evidence.com body-camera cloud, “Infobase – TPD employee data,” and a reserved slot for a data source “similar in size, complexity, and scope to Oracle HR.” An unlimited number of TPD employees can use it. An FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) security addendum has Peregrine “provide services accessing” the state’s criminal justice network, the Florida Crime Information Center, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and the Interstate Identification Index “via network connectivity to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”

The AI terms are their own document. The City warrants it “will not rely on outputs generated by the AI Assistant” as “the sole basis for any decision, action, or omission, including, as applicable any investigative, enforcement, or operational decisions,” and that every output will be “reviewed, validated, and confirmed against underlying source data.” Peregrine, for its part, says any outputs “may be incomplete, incorrect, or misleading and are generated based on probabilistic models,” and that it may keep “the content of queries submitted to and responses generated by the AI Assistant.”

What TPD told Purchasing

The supporting documents also include the August draft of the same order form. In front of it is the document that explains the purchase. On Aug. 4, Acting Chief Brett Owen sent Purchasing Director Deanna Faggart a memo, “Conditions and Circumstances – Standardization for Peregrine,” asking the City to standardize on the product. It is two pages, and it does not describe an internal tool.

“Peregrine has also been selected as the exclusive platform for Florida Department of Law Enforcement Criminal Justice grant funding to law enforcement agencies,” Owen wrote. “Peregrine is currently utilized by numerous law enforcement agencies and soon will be the primary data-sharing platform across the State of Florida by law enforcement agencies.” Then the need:

“As the sub-recipient for the initial funding of Peregrine, and as the State of Florida will provide grant funding to other agencies, Peregrine will be the primary platform across the State of Florida for the sharing of criminal investigative information and managing the integration of data into a unified platform. Thus, in order to standardize and share law enforcement information across state law enforcement agencies, Tampa Police Department needs to utilize Peregrine platform for its data integration and sharing solution.”

The supporting documents also include Peregrine’s sales proposal to TPD, and TPD’s statement to WFLA after the September meeting reads like that proposal with Spring Break taken out. “During a hurricane, large-scale events, or heavily visited areas like Ybor, supervisors could use the system to view calls for service, officer locations, and available assets in one place, allowing them to make real-time decisions about the deployment of personnel and resources,” the department said. The proposal’s version: “Run high-impact events off one map. Spring Break, Hurricane Season, New Year’s, Sunset Music Festival, and beyond all live in a single view that shows call for service, unit locations, planned footprints, and emerging hotspots.”

Sharing is a setting

Here is the one term that speaks to Viera’s question. The contract defines “Authorized Sharing” as “the disclosure of Customer Data to one or more third parties solely to support Customer’s operational needs, as expressly permitted in a separate written agreement between Peregrine and Customer.” “Any such sharing will occur only as specifically authorized by Customer and implemented by deliberate configuration within Peregrine’s platform. Customer Data will not otherwise be disclosed to any third party.” In other words, sharing is a feature. Whether it gets used depends on a separate agreement, which isn’t in the supporting documents, and a setting TPD controls. The memo to Purchasing already says what the agreement will be for. Peregrine’s Tim Shriver put the mechanism the same way to WFLA after the meeting: “That data only gets shared with another agency by Peregrine if we’re directly told to do so.”

That is the Flock arrangement over again. Council approved Flock’s master agreement in December 2023 and two camera orders since, and the agreement never says who can search Tampa’s cameras. What council had instead, last September, was members relaying what then-Chief Lee Bercaw had told them. “I called up Chief Bercaw and spoke to him about it,” Viera said. Carlson’s version: TPD doesn’t share “unless there is a specific open case for a specific person.” Network sharing in Flock is standing access, not a case-by-case decision, and TPD is in it. Other departments’ Flock transparency pages list “Tampa FL PD” among the organizations granted access to their cameras: Mount Dora, whose list on Sept. 30 ran 561 agencies in roughly 36 states and included the FBI and two out-of-state fusion centers, and Belle Isle in Orange County, 200 agencies the same day. That is inbound. TPD can search theirs. Who can search Tampa’s is TPD’s own choice, and TPD publishes no transparency page. Tallahassee’s says it shares with no partner networks. In August, FDOT revoked every general-use permit for plate readers on state roads, any vendor, citing “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns and surveillance schemes,” and TPD pulled 17 cameras. The contract continues.

The other end of the pipe

The question council keeps asking is whether Tampa’s data reaches federal immigration enforcement. The documents say that Tampa’s end is a configuration, and the other end is being built with public money TPD already takes.

Some of it already gets there by a route older than any of this software. The Prison Policy Initiative’s Oct. 6 analysis of ICE’s own arrest records describes it: fingerprints taken at a stop or a booking go to a shared FBI database, ICE compares them against its records, and a detainer follows a match. “Without routine, voluntary, and extraneous data sharing by law enforcement, ICE could not issue detainer requests.” Detainer-related ICE arrests have more than doubled nationally since 2024, and the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday that immigration arrests by local law enforcement in Tampa Bay have doubled since the Biden administration: 633 ICE arrests in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco from Jan. 20 through Aug. 5, 288 of them on detainers and 158 more at law enforcement locations without one. Hillsborough accounted for 474. The fastest-growing category in Hillsborough is ICE arrests made at a law enforcement location with no detainer involved: 12 in the last year of the Biden administration, 63 in the first Trump year, 134 in the first six and a half months of this one.

The state end

Two dozen Florida agencies have bought Peregrine with State Board of Immigration Enforcement grants, which by statute pay for “hardware or software essential to assisting the Federal Government in its enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Plant City got $271,352 of it “for tracking immigration enforcement efforts.” The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office got $1.26 million from the same board for a data platform its application doesn’t name, “especially for immigration investigations.” The new state budget gives FDLE $6 million for “a statewide criminal intelligence integration and aggregation platform” and directs it to “coordinate with the provider and participating state and local law enforcement and justice agencies to connect investigative data, dispatch and operation information, and criminal justice records.” No vendor is named. Peregrine has a nonbinding agreement with FDLE and the Department of Corrections to build one, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Owen’s memo goes further than the Legislature did. It says Peregrine “has also been selected as the exclusive platform” for FDLE’s grant funding. The state budget’s $6 million line says FDLE is to “competitively procure” a platform and names no vendor. Whether TPD becomes a “participating” agency isn’t a question anyone has put on a Tampa agenda. TPD answered it anyway, on the first page of a memo to Purchasing.

The federal end

It runs through a grant council accepts every year without a word. On Aug. 27, in a consent block, council took TPD’s annual grant from the Central Florida High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, the federal counterdrug program known as HIDTA: $306,046 in overtime, leased cars and buy money for a drug task force. The 2026 award conditions are new. Compliance with a list of executive orders is now a condition, starting with Executive Order 14159, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” And: “as a condition for receiving this award, recipients must coordinate all counterdrug operations with a local or regional Homeland Security Task Force.” Those task forces were created by that same order. Tampa’s is co-led by the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, FOX 13 reported in May. The Central Florida HIDTA’s own rules say “Each participating agency will provide their assigned representatives access to the parent agency’s intelligence/law enforcement databases.” Nationally, the HIDTA program links local plate-reader cameras “to the DEA-administered LPR system housed at EPIC,” the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center, in the words of the drug czar’s office’s own report to Congress, a pipeline 404 Media reported on last month. A DEA privacy assessment it obtained describes the mechanics: contributing agencies “transmit their LPR data to servers maintained by regional hubs pursuant to their individual MOUs, which stipulate that this data may be shared with the NLPRP system.” Those memoranda are agency by agency, on top of the grant, not anything council has seen. In Georgia, the state transportation department made a HIDTA memorandum a condition of keeping plate readers in its right of way. Florida’s pulled the permits. TPD’s September officer of the month is assigned to that HIDTA task force as a Homeland Security Investigations task force officer, council was told on Sept. 3.

None of this shows Tampa’s plate reads, or next year its Peregrine data, on a federal server. Nothing council has voted on rules it out either. The HIDTA grant requires TPD to give the program’s intelligence center access to its investigative databases. The Flock agreement never says who can search Tampa’s cameras. The Peregrine contract leaves sharing to a separate agreement and a configuration, and TPD’s own memo says sharing across the state is the reason to buy it.

The briefings were under way by Oct. 1. Clendenin said he “asked for additional information after my meeting,” and Council Member Guido Maniscalco said Owen had called him. Members either got the briefing and are fine with it, got it and aren’t, or didn’t get it and will decide on the day.

The money is still the prosecutor’s Ybor “community engagement” appropriation, the same funding that bought the drones in April. What it buys this time, in TPD’s own words to Purchasing, is a place on “the primary data-sharing platform across the State of Florida.” Council heard “not a camera or surveillance system.” Both are true. Only one of them was said out loud.