The state gave this county a date. Sept. 30, and every license plate reader in the right of way of a state road is supposed to be down by then. Nobody in this county voted on that. Engineering and Operations Memorandum 26-01 reaches the right of way of roads on the State Highway System, and it reaches nothing else here.
Everything else is a local call. County road is the county’s. The cities have their own. Whatever is still standing on county road on Oct. 1 is standing because somebody here decided to leave it up, and the somebody is the sheriff.
That call is the sheriff’s to make. Nothing here argues otherwise. It is still a decision, and a decision has a reason behind it that somebody ought to be able to examine.
The office has given two of them.
The first is effectiveness, and it arrives with numbers on it. On Aug. 13 the office posted that it introduced license plate reader technology in 2017 and operates 180 cameras countywide, and News4JAX printed the list that came with it: locating more than 600 stolen vehicles and 300 stolen tags, recovering 164 items of stolen property, locating 247 wanted individuals, locating 180 missing individuals, and “charging 831 individuals responsible for crimes.” All of it since 2017. The office has said that it has not identified any misuse of the system by its own personnel in that time.
The sheriff put his position in that post too. The technology is “an essential tool helping to keep St. Johns County safe,” he said, and it is “too valuable to lose; it’s here to stay.”
The sheriff’s statement on Sept. 2 opens on the same ground. “The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office remains confident in the effectiveness and overwhelming success of license plate reader technology,” it begins.
The second reason comes next, and the statement itself marks it as an addition. “In addition, I am humbled by the trust the community has shown for our agency’s use of this valuable tool,” Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick said.
Two reasons, in that order. A reader can go at the first one, because the counts are published and a person can ask what a located vehicle is and how many of the 831 ended in a conviction. The second is a claim about what the people who live here think, and nothing has been published that says where it comes from.
So the Tattler asked the office, in writing. Six questions went to media@sjso.org on Friday, Sept. 11, the address the agency’s own media relations guide asks reporters to use. One asked what the assessment of community trust is based on. One asked whether the office has ever surveyed, polled or otherwise measured opinion here on the readers, and whether it would release what it found. One asked whether the scope of the program is the sheriff’s call or a call for elected policymakers. One asked how long reader data is kept and which agencies outside this one can query it. The deadline ran out at five o’clock Monday afternoon with no answer to any of the six. Nothing has arrived since.
Tampa’s acting chief answered a version of the first one the day after the order came down. He said his department had built trust through collaboration and transparency, and he named community trust and oversight as the standing test for new technology. That is an answer a person can take issue with, line by line. That is what makes it one.
The count is the other thing missing. The office says it operates 180 cameras countywide. Which of the 180 sit in state right of way, and therefore come down by Sept. 30, has not been published by the state, by the county or by the office.
Agencies in other counties produced that number within a day or two of the memorandum. Pinellas County’s sheriff said 23 of his agency’s 73 fixed readers went in under state permits, and St. Petersburg police put their share at six of the 50 available to officers. Tampa police gave the figure as 17 and said all 17 would be gone inside the thirty days. The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office did not have its own count yet, and a named spokesperson said so the day after the order went out.
The sheriff has taken questions on the cameras in public, and it happened in front of this board. He came to the Sept. 3 budget hearing to ask for $3.9 million to raise deputy pay, and, in News4JAX’s account of the evening, “most of the public comment focused on license plate readers and Flock cameras.”
He told the commissioners the office will comply with the state and take the cameras off state roads. He said $500,000 in the proposed budget is set aside for reader software, and that the money could go to the jail instead if the commission or the Legislature shuts the system down.
On what happens to the program after him, he named the calls he has made.
“I think the biggest concern is what happens when Rob Hardwick leaves. I know we’re going to say something that says trust in our legislature, we’re doing that. I’ve had phone calls from Senator Wright, I’ve talked to Senator Lee, I talked to Rep. Kendall, I talk to Rep. Greco, I have talked to Rep. Judson, I’m speaking with the governor’s staff,” Hardwick said, in the same account.
That is the office answering out loud, at a meeting of this board, with residents in the room.
It is also where it stopped. Asked after the meeting what becomes of the cameras on county road, the sheriff declined to answer directly and pointed back to the written statement.
There is a record here of what people in this county have said about the cameras, and it runs one way. The minutes of the Aug. 4 regular meeting set down five speakers on them in general public comment, at pages 5 and 6 of eleven. The minutes of the Aug. 18 regular meeting set down four more, at page 4 of ten. Eight of those nine turns are recorded as opposition, or as questions about cost, effectiveness and who gets to search the database. The ninth is recorded as speaking on funding options for the cameras and on whether residents should be the ones to decide. Then came the budget hearing.
Nine speaking turns and an evening of public comment is not a measurement of a county, and nobody should treat it as one.
The rest of it is an exhibit attached to those minutes.
Exhibit A to the Aug. 18 record is a citizen petition, at packet page 11 of 61, asking the board and the sheriff to decommission the network and to require public notice, an open hearing and a board vote before the next purchase. Signature pages follow it, handwritten sheets first and then an export from an online petition. Behind those, at packet pages 20 through 22, sits a drafted county ordinance that would do what the petition asks. It is not on the Sept. 1 agenda, the Sept. 3 agenda or Tuesday’s.
The readers have never been an item in front of this board this year. The Clerk has posted fifteen sets of minutes for 2026, Jan. 20 through Aug. 19, and the cameras turn up in two of them, both times in general public comment, which is the part of the morning with no motion at the end of it. Which is fine. It is also not a decision.
Tuesday’s regular agenda runs thirteen items, with twenty-one more on consent behind them. Two of those concern the Sheriff’s Office. Consent 8 leases space for a substation in Hastings. Consent 12 is Contract Amendment No. 20, adding janitorial services for Sheriff’s Office facilities, “resulting in an annual increase of $388,050.00.” Both are ordinary business and both belong there.
Consent 21 approves the minutes of the Sept. 1 regular meeting and of the Sept. 3 budget hearing. Neither set is posted yet. The record of the evening the cameras took over the room gets approved in one motion with twenty other items.
A board on the other coast spent the same three weeks on it differently. On Sept. 10 a Pinellas County commissioner proposed ending his county’s contracts, subscriptions and data sharing with reader vendors and pulling the cameras off county-controlled road. He stopped short of bringing the resolution to a vote after the board agreed to take the whole subject up with its sheriff at a workshop on Oct. 8, and the chair said what that workshop ought to cover. Commissioners took no action on the resolution that day. A Florida county commission and its sheriff will sit in a room and argue it out in public, eight days after the removal deadline.
The county’s own calendar lists three more board meetings this fall, Oct. 6, Oct. 20 and Nov. 3, and no workshop on anything to do with the readers.
The remedy the office named is legislation, and the governor named the same one on Aug. 26, saying the only way to deal with this is legislatively. The sheriff told the board on Sept. 3 that he has been calling legislators about it, and the Senate’s 2027 bill list currently reads seventeen bills found, all of them claim bills filed Aug. 7, each one relief against a local government or a state agency. The House list for the same session reads zero bills found. Nothing on the readers has been filed in either chamber.
None of this requires anybody to be wrong about the cameras. They may be worth keeping on county road, the office has made that case in public with counts attached to it, and the case is the office’s to make.
The other half of it was never made. The sentence about the trust the community has shown is doing real work in that statement, and six questions about the program went out on a Friday and ran out on a Monday.
The board that could ask them on the record has never put the cameras on an agenda.
Sept. 30 is a Wednesday. This board meets the Tuesday after, and that agenda is not posted yet.
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