To the mayors, city council members, county commissioners, police chiefs, sheriffs, and every other public official responsible for license plate surveillance in the Shoals:
We, the undersigned residents and neighbors of the Shoals, are asking you to end the use of Flock Safety cameras and other systems that track ordinary people's movements without a warrant.
These cameras do not only look for a wanted car. They photograph and catalog every vehicle that passes, record where it was and when, and place that information into a searchable system. Most of the people in that system are not suspected of any crime. They are going to work, taking their children to school, visiting a doctor, attending church, seeing friends, or simply living their lives.
That is not targeted police work. It is mass surveillance.
Our local governments are paying private companies with public money to build a record of where people go. The data can be searched and shared far beyond the agency that collected it. Once that record exists, promises and policies are not enough to guarantee it will never be abused, accessed improperly, exposed, or used for a purpose nobody admitted to when the cameras went up.
If law enforcement has probable cause to track a person's movements, the Constitution already provides a way to do that: bring the evidence to a judge and get a warrant. The answer is not to record everybody first and ask questions later.
We are calling on every city and county government in the Shoals that uses or is considering this technology to:
- End existing Flock Safety and automated license plate reader contracts, and do not renew them.
- Stop buying or installing new cameras while those contracts are being ended.
- Disable outside-agency and nationwide data sharing, and require collected data to be deleted when it can lawfully be deleted.
- Publish the contracts, costs, camera locations, retention rules, access policies, and audit logs, with only the redactions the law actually requires.
- Do not replace Flock with another mass tracking system under a different name. Any future surveillance proposal should require public notice, a public vote, strict limits, and a warrant for searches of a person's movements.
Public safety matters. So do privacy, due process, and the basic right to move through your own community without being entered into a database. We should not have to surrender one to have the other.
Take the cameras down. End the contracts. Stop treating every driver in the Shoals like a suspect.