A state order revokes the permits for the license plate readers the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office has placed in the right of way of state roads. The agency says it is complying, and it has not said how many of its cameras that order reaches. It has not answered questions from other news organizations beyond one written statement, published Sept. 2, that announces the compliance and defends the technology at the same time.
The order is Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, issued Aug. 31 by the Florida Department of Transportation. It is signed by Chief Operating Officer Will Watts, it is addressed to local agency permitholders, and it cites section 316.0777, Florida Statutes. That statute gives the department the authority to approve or deny a local agency’s request to place a reader in state right of way, and to remove one.
The memorandum treats approvals for assets in state rights of way as temporary in nature, and then revokes all of them at once. The operative passage puts both the work and the clock on the agencies holding the permits.
“As such, all LPR-related LPR related approvals issued by the Department to a local law enforcement agency are hereby revoked and must be removed by the permittee within 30 days of the date of this memorandum. If such removal has not occurred within the 30-day period, the Department will remove any remaining devices subject to this memorandum.”
Thirty days from the date on the memorandum falls on Sept. 30, which is the deadline the memorandum sets for the permittees. The department also wrote that it will use its discretionary authority to stop issuing approvals for any future placements within its jurisdiction.
The department set out its reasons for the revocation in a single sentence of the memorandum. It wrote that it was acting on “the recent exponential increase in deployments along our roadways, coupled with concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes.”
The Sheriff’s Office answered on Sept. 2, on the public information and media page it keeps for agency statements. The statement opens by saying the office is complying with the memorandum requiring removal of the technology from the right of way of a road on the State Highway System. The rest of it is a defense of the program, and the agency attributes that part to Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick.
“The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office remains confident in the effectiveness and overwhelming success of license plate reader technology. In addition, I am humbled by the trust the community has shown for our agency’s use of this valuable tool. As your Sheriff, it is my responsibility to protect you, the citizens and visitors of St. Johns County. As technology evolves, we will continue to pursue the best balance between public safety and personal privacy.”
The statement adds that the office supports legislation that addresses concerns about the technology and sets clear standards for its use. It says the agency expects to work with the Florida Sheriffs Association, state legislators and local stakeholders on that policy.
The agency has been running the technology for nine years, and it says it has not identified any misuse of the system by its personnel in that time. It has also published counts it attributes to the readers since 2017, among them 247 wanted individuals located and 180 missing individuals located. In a statement posted on Aug. 13, and quoted the same day by News4JAX, the office said it “introduced license plate reader technology in 2017 and currently operates 180 cameras countywide.”
Hardwick’s position in August was not a qualified one, in a characterization by News4JAX rather than in a statement the agency published in his name. Reporting the agency’s statement that day, the outlet wrote that the sheriff “also made his position on LPR technology very clear: it’s here to stay.”
He has given much the same answer to the privacy objection in his public comments. Jacksonville Today published one version of it, from an exchange after a news conference that the outlet dates only to last month.
“If you’re not committing, you know, violent crimes, and you’re not wanted by federal, state or local government for a crime, then there’s nothing to hide.”
How many of those 180 cameras stand in state right of way is not published anywhere. That is the number that decides how much of the program actually changes, and it does not appear in any public document. News4JAX reported on Sept. 3 that it asked the office whether cameras on other roads would come down, and was told it would not elaborate. Jacksonville Today reported the same day that a spokesperson declined to comment beyond the written statement.
The money attached to the program was discussed on the record the next day, at the Sept. 3 budget hearing. Hardwick said $500,000 in the proposed budget is set aside for software updates to the readers, according to News4JAX. He said the money could be redirected if the commission or the Legislature shuts the system down, and he named the county jail as one alternative.
The state order followed several weeks of public comment from the governor, Ron DeSantis. Speaking at Florida International University in Miami on Aug. 26, he said, “I think these cameras, the license plate readers, I think it’s out of control,” according to News4JAX. He said in the same remarks that “the only way it could be dealt with is legislatively.”
Five days later, on the day the memorandum was issued, he put the same point in terms of an ordinary errand. The Florida Phoenix, which reported the remarks he made in Jacksonville, transcribed them this way.
“You want to get in your car and you want to go to down to Buc-ees in St Augustine, it’s really none of the government’s damn business if you’re doing that, right?”
Fox Business, reporting the same news conference, published the same remarks from the governor. He has said that a statewide limit on the technology would have to be written by the Legislature.
Other agencies in the region went further than the memorandum required, and the Clay County Sheriff’s Office said it would take every reader off Clay County roadways. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office halted use throughout Duval County on Aug. 31, and News4JAX published the statement of Duval County Sheriff T.K. Waters. He said the technology “has proven to be an enormously valuable investigative tool,” and that he had determined discontinuing it was “the appropriate course of action at this time.”
The cameras had been a recurring subject in front of the County Commission before any of that happened. The minutes of the Aug. 4 regular meeting record five speakers on the county’s use of the cameras during general public comment, two of whom entered written exhibits. The minutes of the Aug. 18 regular meeting record four more, including one who raised how the cameras are paid for and whether residents should decide on their use.
Entered as Exhibit A to the Aug. 18 record is a citizen petition addressed to the sheriff and the commission. It puts the network at “over 160 active Flock Safety Automated License Plate Readers,” which is the petitioners’ count and not the agency’s. According to the exhibit, the petition also asks the county to require public notice, open hearings and commission approval before any future purchase of the technology. It calls on the sheriff and the board to “decommission and remove all Flock Safety ALPR systems and facial recognition integrations currently operating on public property within county lines.”
County officials have not landed in the same place on the removal, and Jacksonville Today reported both positions on Sept. 3. Commissioner Ann Taylor said “residents’ voices have been heard” on the matter, and Commission Chair Clay Murphy took the opposite view of it. Murphy, a former Florida Highway Patrol officer, told the outlet that he thought the readers were doing the job they had been asked to do. He said of the state’s decision, “I think it’s a blow to public safety.”
The Tattler put six questions to the Sheriff’s Office on Friday and asked for a response by 5 p.m. on Monday. Among them were what the office’s assessment of community trust is based on and whether it has measured local opinion on the readers. It was also asked how it weighs public opinion against its own operational judgment. A further question was whether it regards the scope of the program as a decision for the sheriff or for elected policymakers.
That deadline ran out at 5 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 14, with no answer to any of the six. The questions went to media@sjso.org, which is the address the office’s own media relations guide asks the press to use. Any answer it sends goes at the top of this story, dated.
What the order does not reach is the rest of the system, because the memorandum covers only the right of way of roads on the State Highway System. That leaves county and city roads to the county and the cities, and the Sheriff’s Office has not said what it intends to do there. The removal deadline in the memorandum falls on Sept. 30, and both the agency and the governor have said that a durable answer would have to come from the Legislature.
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