WHITEHALL — With a vote looming next month on whether to cancel the county’s contract for automated license-plate readers, the sheriff’s office is making its case for keeping them, telling supervisors the cameras have figured in more than a dozen investigations since they went up.
In materials prepared for the county board ahead of its August meeting, the office has described the Flock Safety cameras as an investigative tool rather than an enforcement one. The readers do not issue tickets and are not used for traffic stops, the office has said; they record plates, and investigators query the system after a crime has been reported. Every search is logged and attributable to the deputy or investigator who ran it, according to the office.
The office has pointed to cases in which plate reads contributed to results: the recovery of a stolen vehicle that passed a camera hours after it was reported taken, the locating of a missing person whose vehicle was flagged along a state highway, and a series of retail theft follow-ups in which a plate read gave investigators a starting point they otherwise lacked. The office has declined to release case numbers or details, citing open investigations.
Supporters on the board have taken up the argument, likening the network to the doorbell cameras that already watch half the mailboxes in the county and asking why local investigators should be the only ones without eyes on the road. At the June meeting that comparison drew a sharp answer from the other camp, for whom the difference between a private doorbell and a searchable government database is the whole of the argument.
Skeptics answer that private doorbell cameras and a networked government database are different things. Supervisor Parrish, whose motion to terminate the contract forced the question, has argued that the issue is not whether the cameras are ever useful but whether the county should run a surveillance system it never voted to create. Critics on the board have also noted that no county policy governs who may search the system, for what purpose, or how often; the 30-day retention period and the access available to outside agencies through Flock’s multi-agency network are set by the company’s defaults, not by anything the board adopted.
Some skeptics have asked a harder question about the case list itself: how many of the dozen-plus cases would have been solved anyway, by tips, canvassing or plain patience. The office has not offered an answer, and there may not be one.
On one point the two sides may converge. The office has said it would comply with whatever rules the board writes — audit requirements, search justifications, limits on outside access — if supervisors choose to keep the cameras under a formal county policy. Whether a policy vote can substitute for a termination vote is a question the board will settle in Whitehall in August.