Where things stand

A camera on Elm Street doesn’t know who you are. It doesn’t need to.

Automated license plate readers photograph every vehicle that passes, record where and when, and make the result searchable later. They don’t begin with a suspect. They begin with everyone.

Biddeford hasn’t bought them. We’re asking the Council to keep it that way — and to require a public hearing and a recorded Council vote before the City acquires any other surveillance technology.

Invented, but not exaggerated — this is the shape of a real reader record. That last field records what the user says the search was for. It doesn’t independently test the justification, and it isn’t a warrant. An audit can document a search after it happens; it can’t reverse it. Biddeford has no such cameras, and no one has proposed any. Status checked August 2026.

That exact word — “investigation” — was the justification entered for all 179 improper searches in a real Flock case. See what happened.

The core problem

Abuse isn’t the only danger. Normal use is enough.

The privacy loss begins when ordinary movement becomes searchable — not only when someone breaks a rule.

• A local policy doesn’t erase a national network

  Sharing restrictions matter, but they depend on settings, contracts, administrators and future policy. Cities that wrote sharing rules later found through audits that outside and federal agencies had queried their cameras anyway. Once a city joins a network, local intent isn’t the same thing as complete local control.

• The record is created at the camera

  Retention limits and access policies govern data that has already been collected. A short-lived location record is still a location record. The only way to guarantee something can’t be searched is not to create it.

• Removal is harder than adoption

  Once cameras are mounted, contracts signed and the system built into daily practice, removal becomes a fight over sunk costs, staff habits and investigations already tied to the tool. Deciding before purchase avoids all of it.

• The next system will arrive under a different name

  Plate readers are today’s example, not the last one. Grants, pilots, donations and department purchases can bring surveillance technology into City government without a public debate — and not only through a police budget. The ordinance draws one bright line around plate readers and creates a public process for whatever comes next.

The record

The danger exists when the rules are broken — and when they’re followed.

One case shows what an authorized user can do for an unauthorized purpose. The other shows how much gets collected when nobody misuses anything at all.

Read the documented cases

The trade

What kind of safety are we buying, and what kind are we giving up?

Safety isn’t only the chance that a crime gets solved faster. It’s also the freedom to move around your own city without being catalogued.

Plate readers ask residents to trade the second kind for the promise of the first. Before Biddeford makes that trade, the burden belongs to the people asking for the power — not to the residents being asked to hand it over.