Monroe County Rolling Back Flock Camera Surveillance

Making an investigation easier is not the same thing as making government surveillance acceptable

Surveillance cameras violate citizens' rights, police should need a warrant to track movements.
Local governments should not collect data they cannot responsibly manage or control.
Public safety arguments for surveillance do not justify the loss of civil liberties.

Flock Safety camera at the intersection of West Sylvania — Source: SOPA Images / Getty

Monroe County Rolling Back Flock Camera Surveillance

Monroe County’s Flock camera rollback puts the surveillance fight front and center. Tony Katz is calling Monroe County’s move to ditch Flock Safety cameras a rare moment of local-government clarity — and a warning to mayors elsewhere who see license-plate surveillance as an easy answer to crime.

“Government doesn’t get to surveil you,” Katz said, arguing that police should need a warrant before tracking a person’s movements. “You’re just gonna have cameras everywhere, and you’re gonna know when I left and when I came here and when I went there. That’s not the role of government.”

Monroe County is moving away from the camera system commonly described as automated license plate readers, or ALPRs. The devices capture license plates and can help law enforcement identify vehicles connected to investigations. Supporters argue the technology gives police a valuable investigative tool. Katz’s response: making an investigation easier is not the same thing as making government surveillance acceptable.

“I’m not here to make a police officer’s job easier,” Katz said. “My rights come before anything the police officer has to do. Always.”

The fight is bigger than Bloomington. Katz directed his criticism at communities across central Indiana, including Carmel, Fishers, Zionsville, Brownsburg, Avon and Indianapolis-area counties, arguing that local officials should reject blanket vehicle tracking rather than defend it because law enforcement favors the cameras.

Monroe County Commissioner Jody Madeira said public surveillance, where it exists, should remain under public control and that local government should not collect information it cannot confidently govern. Katz said that rationale does not go far enough. In his view, the issue is not whether a county can responsibly manage surveillance data; it is whether the county should be collecting it at all.

“Monroe County has no right to surveil its citizens,” Katz said, extending that argument to Hamilton, Hendricks, Hancock and Johnson counties. “You don’t get to track American citizens.”

That puts a blunt constitutional line through the usual public-safety sales pitch. Officials can point to arrests or stolen vehicles recovered with camera data, Katz argued, but the question remains what the public gives up in return. His answer was equally blunt: too much.

“If someone should get harmed out there, and you say, ‘Well, if we had had these cameras, that wouldn’t happen,’ that’s pure, raw, unadulterated evil,” Katz said. “It’s absolute evil.”

Katz also tied the surveillance dispute to broader concerns about public safety leadership in Marion County, criticizing Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett and Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears while urging surrounding communities to focus on their own responsibilities. But on Flock cameras, his message was simpler: no workaround, no bureaucratic qualifier, no government tracking dragnet/ Monroe County, he said, got this one right.