By Curmudgeon
Our Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office has installed seven Flock Safety license plate cameras around the county, four of them right here in beautiful Salida. On paper, it sounds reasonable: catch stolen cars, help with Amber Alerts, and give our small department a fighting chance. And yes, they’ve had some real successes.
But here’s where the Curmudgeon starts growling.This Flock camera debate is a textbook case of politics making strange bedfellows. Progressive cities like Denver have dumped their contracts over privacy fears and federal data-sharing worries. Conservative-led states like Arkansas, Idaho, and Montana have passed laws to rein the technology in. Libertarians at Reason magazine are yelling “Orwellian,” while the Institute for Justice is suing cities from both sides of the aisle.
Even Benjamin Franklin is spinning in his grave: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Left, right, and center, we’ve all suddenly rediscovered the Constitution when it suits us. Yet here we sit in little Chaffee County, population roughly the size of a good Walmart parking lot on a Saturday, happily running the same surveillance network that bigger, supposedly smarter places are backing away from.
These cameras photograph every vehicle that passes, create a digital fingerprint, and ship the data off to a private company’s servers in Atlanta for thirty days. And yes, there are already multiple documented cases nationwide of officers using the system to stalk ex-wives, girlfriends, and romantic rivals. The ones we know about are bad enough. The ones we’ll never hear about are probably worse.
Look, I’m not against catching bad guys. I’m against turning every public road in God’s country into a 30-day rolling surveillance checkpoint run by a company in Georgia, especially when both the far-left and far-right are waving red flags about it.
If this tool is so wonderful, treat it like the powerful instrument it is: strict local control, full public audit logs, ironclad rules against personal use, and zero automatic sharing outside our county.
Otherwise, we’re not buying safety.
We’re just selling our freedom on the cheap, while the strangest of political bedfellows laugh at us from both sides. In the end, that’s a lousy bargain no matter how you dress it up.
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