Sept. 9, 2026
Aaron Baker
For BrevardBeagle.com
The national discourse taking place across our country on FLOCK cameras includes a common refrain from opponents: “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”
It is a call from the public begging their elected officials and local leaders to exercise judgment and restraint – to push back against the ego-driven excess apparent in every news headline of the day.
It is an attempt by the disenfranchised to place even a modicum of constraint and accountability upon the powerful. It’s working.
Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are much more than cameras.
The image recognition capabilities the technology possesses, paired with the digital surveillance network on which they operate, create an almost limitless dragnet of police monitoring. This network is not restricted to a single city, county, or state. It extends as far and wide as the customer base of whichever multi-billion-dollar security company happens to own the cameras you drive by.
Personnel from any participating agency could have access to the cameras and the data they collect. It’s an impersonal, all-seeing eye with a neural network accessible to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of strangers you will never meet.
As chairperson of Brevard’s Public Safety Committee, I learned about the potential usefulness of Axon or FLOCK cameras through a security-first lens. Chief Wentzell and the Brevard Police Department came before the committee three times with well-researched proposals and common-sense policy documents regarding the potential operation of these cameras within the city.
I have no doubt the men and women of the Brevard Police Department would act ethically if granted the use of security cameras within city limits and that the policies put forward by the chief would ensure accountability if they did not. This was never a question of trust in our own department.
The fact is FLOCK and Axon are not a simple camera system connected to a server located within our own police department building. The city would not even own the cameras themselves.
You will recognize the business model at work here – a subscription service. Just like Amazon Prime, Netflix, or any other such service, the customer never truly “owns” anything. You may purchase a digital movie on Amazon Prime to stream for family movie night, but try reselling that movie at a family garage sale years later.
Did you ever really possess the movie at all?
ALPR vendors insist their customers own the data they collect – that the millions of surveillance photos captured by their cameras are securely the property of the cities, counties, and states who contract with them.
My response: prove it.
You cannot physically hold data like you can hold a VHS tape of The Land Before Time. With ALPR data, our police investigators would not be holding the Polaroid of the back of a car driving down Broad Street.
Rather, the data lives on an Axon server we cannot inspect, is potentially replicated across many other platforms we will never see, and is governed by a contract we didn’t write.
“Ownership” of this sensitive data isn’t based on being able to inspect and verify where it is located with our own eyes – it is but a word within a contract.
I’ll admit that as a Millennial who was 13 years old in 1999, much of my own life is now bound up in the ethereal, fleeting nature of contemporary technology and the data tracking we’re all but required to accept in order to participate in modern life.
But just because we can, does not mean we should. Government overreach is still bad, even if private companies are giving us malevolent examples of similar invasions of privacy everywhere we look.
Government should be protecting us from these practices, not jumping on the surveillance bandwagon.
This is just one of many reasons to oppose ALPR cameras. After three committee presentations and a specially-called public input session, the Brevard City Council (on the advice of the chief of police) decided to not move forward with ALPR cameras in our city. This was not a vote against our police department or against public security. It was instead a vote for accountability and transparency, inspired by people in our city who spoke up.
“Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should,” is the call of people pushing back.
Today, when so much feels out of our control, winning a fight like this will not restrain powerful people from trying to take advantage of the rest of us … but it’s a good start.
Aaron Baker is mayor pro tem and a second-term member of Brevard City Council. A Transylvania County resident of over two decades, he calls Brevard home with his teenage son. Each month he writes “A. Baker’s Dozen” for BrevardBeagle.com, taking a closer look at the local issues behind the headlines. He can be reached for comment at aaron.baker@cityofbrevard.com.