BOSTON — Boston city councilors said Tuesday that the Boston Police Department has kept using social media monitoring tools for more than a year after the City Council voted not to approve them. The department is now asking the council to sign off on a revised policy for the tools.

The issue came up at a joint hearing of the council's public safety and government operations committees. The hearing covered three items: the city's 2025 annual surveillance report, the department's revised use policy for social media analysis tools, and a proposed amendment to the city's surveillance oversight ordinance.

Councilor Henry Santana, who chairs the public safety committee, said a version of the social media policy came before the council in late 2025 and was not approved. After working with the city's Surveillance Oversight Advisory Board, the city adopted four of the board's five recommendations and resubmitted the policy, Santana said.

"If everything is an exigent circumstance"

Under the 2022 ordinance, the city may use surveillance technology only after the council approves it, unless there are exigent circumstances. Councilor Benjamin Weber said the social media tools were in use before the council's vote, have stayed in use and that the department has added another tool since.

Weber said his understanding was that the emergency the department cited to start using the tools was the 2024 presidential election. "If everything is an exigent circumstance, then nothing is," he said.

A department official answering Weber said the city's law department had told police it was legitimate to keep using the tools. The official said exigent circumstances remained, "not directly related to the election, but in terms of the overall threat environment." The official also said the department viewed last year's council vote as sending the policy to the advisory board for more advice, "not a disapproval of the technology."

Police Commissioner Michael Cox rejected the idea that the department had used a loophole. "There is no loophole," Cox said. He said the department has used license plate readers for about 20 years under prior approval, and that buying from different vendors for an approved technology is allowed. Cox said new reporting requirements would pull staff away from their main duties, and that the proposed changes "just seems like overkill."

Proposed fixes to the ordinance

Santana said the amendment, which he sponsored with Weber and another councilor, would do three things: clarify the emergency exception, require notice when the city signs agreements with new surveillance vendors, and strengthen reporting on automated license plate readers.

Weber said councilors were told last year that the department's pilot with the license plate camera company Flock had ended, and later learned the city had moved to two other vendors without telling the council. Citing an audit, he said about half of the department's Flock searches were not tied to a case.

Asked whether there had been any breach in oversight of the city's surveillance tools, a department official said the Flock pilot agreement barred the company from sharing the city's data and that the company shared it anyway. "We were a victim of that as well," the official said.

What the revised policy would do

City officials said the revised policy covers social media analysis tools as a category rather than naming specific products, spells out when the tools can be used, raises the bar for keeping collected data and adds training requirements. The listed uses include information tied to a criminal nexus or public safety threat, or to a reasonable suspicion that an identifiable person or group has committed or is planning a crime.

Ryan Walsh, director of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, said the department currently uses two social media analysis tools. He said analysts generally ignore the tools' AI sentiment analysis features and review the posts themselves. Officials said collected data is reviewed over a few days, most of it is purged, and anything needed for an investigation is moved to the department's case management system.

Police officials said the tools helped them detect at least four bomb threats against city facilities over the summer, identify people who threatened senior elected officials, including one case that led to an arrest, and assist in more than 30 sexual assault investigations.

Councilor Julia Mejia asked the administration for written answers, a full inventory of the technologies in use, data-sharing agreements and records of council authorization within 14 days.

Immigration questions

Asked how the city would square federal homeland security grant conditions with its Trust Act, Cox said the department does not take part in civil immigration enforcement "now or in the future." He said he had been personally called out by the federal administration over the department's lack of cooperation, including in a lawsuit. Walsh said officials would return Friday for a separate hearing on the grant.

In presenting the 2025 report, which covers 22 technologies, police officials credited surveillance tools with helping solve shootings, homicides and hit-and-runs. They said the city recorded 31 homicides in 2025, the second-lowest total since 1999.