The cameras worked Friday. A tracker on all of us would work better

The cameras worked on Friday.

A bank on County Road 210 was robbed just after three in the afternoon. The plate readers put a white Audi with tape over its plate near St. Johns Parkway within minutes, the intelligence unit went back and found the same car earlier in the day before the tape went on, and it was sitting at an apartment complex at 3:23. A person was in custody before the afternoon was out, and a rifle and the clothing came out of the apartment with him.

Grant every word of that, and the argument built on top of it still collapses one step past itself. If the test for a surveillance tool is how fast this county catches people, then the readers fail that test too, because a transponder bolted to every car in St. Johns County would have found that Audi in four minutes instead of fifteen.

Nobody has proposed the transponder. Including the sheriff. That is the argument, and the rest of this column is detail.

The sentence, and what it is about

“From the time the robbery was reported, the suspect vehicle was located within about 15 minutes,” the sheriff said.

That is a sentence about a car. This paper kept the distinction in the news story and it is worth keeping here, because fifteen minutes to a vehicle and an afternoon to an arrest are two facts and only one of them is in the quote.

Set even that aside. Grant the strong version. Grant that the cameras shortened a dangerous afternoon, that the 2026 counts are what the office says they are, and that thirty-five missing people recovered is thirty-five families who got a phone call.

Why speed cannot be the test

The trouble with answering a question about liberty by producing a clearance rate is that the answer has no floor under it.

Every objection raised about the readers is answered better by something worse. A transponder on every car in the county would have found that Audi in four minutes instead of fifteen, and would find the next one in two. A deputy posted in every kitchen in St. Johns County would clear domestic cases at a rate no agency in Florida has ever posted. A microphone in every truck cab would do things for the drug caseload that a hundred and eighty-two cameras cannot approach.

Every one of those is more effective than what the sheriff has. Not one of them has been proposed by anybody, in any room, in this county.

Including by the sheriff.

That silence is the whole argument

And that is the part worth sitting with, because it is not a gotcha. It is a concession, and it was made before this column was written.

A man who genuinely believed that effectiveness settles the question would be asking for the transponder. He is not asking for it. He has not asked for it, he will not ask for it, and if somebody else asked for it he would be against it, and he would be right.

So the sheriff already agrees there is a line. He drew one himself: he has said the cameras coming down under the state directive will not be relocated anywhere else in the county, which is a man deciding where a camera does not go.

Which is fine. That is the job.

But a line he drew privately is not a line this county drew, and the whole dispute is about where it sits and who is allowed to move it. The effectiveness answer does not locate that line. It cannot. It is the same answer at a hundred and eighty-two cameras that it is at four hundred, and the same answer with a thirty-day retention as with the three-year retention the office kept two administrations ago, and the same answer on the day somebody proposes the transponder.

An answer that does not change when the facts change is not answering anything.

What a real argument would look like

Commissioner Whitehurst put the shape of it in one sentence at the September meeting. “It might make people easier to catch, but it doesn’t keep us safe.”

A reader can disagree with that. That is what makes it an argument. It names the thing being traded and it says what it is worth, and the person saying it can be made to defend both halves.

The office has never made that argument in public here. It has made the other one, over and over, with better numbers each time.

And the other one is not addressed to anybody who has actually objected. Nobody at that microphone in September said the cameras do not work. They said they work and that is the problem. Answering them with a clearance rate is not persuasion. It is a way of not having the conversation while appearing to have it, and it only lands on somebody who has not followed it one step further.

That is a choice about who the argument is for.

Tuesday

The board is asked on Tuesday. Nine in the morning, the County Auditorium at 500 San Sebastian View, regular item 1, headed Discussion on License Plate Readers in County Rights of Way.

The backup for it is one page. It is a county agenda item form dated Oct. 6 from the County Attorney, and the heading on it that reads SUGGESTED MOTION/RECOMMENDATION/ACTION is followed by nothing at all. None of the nine documents the Sheriff’s Office published on Oct. 13 is attached to it. The county does not publish how many of these cameras stand in a county right of way, which is the exact thing the item is about.

This paper sent the office six questions on Sept. 11. One of them asked whether the scope of the program is the sheriff’s call or a call for elected policymakers. That was thirty-seven days ago.

The agency briefed a television station about Friday’s arrest on Saturday evening. Its own news page still ends on Aug. 7.