The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office told the county commission Tuesday that it has reduced the time it keeps license plate reader data to 30 days and has stopped sharing that data with law enforcement agencies outside the county, according to News4JAX, which reported on the hearing.
The hearing was the second and final statutory hearing on the county’s millage rates and its budget for fiscal year 2027, and it was noticed for 5:01 p.m. in the County Auditorium. News4JAX reported that the commission approved the budget and that public comment at the meeting was taken up substantially with the cameras.
The retention period was three years under the prior administration and was then reduced to one year before reaching 30 days, with the system overwriting older data automatically, according to the News4JAX account of what the sheriff and Patrol and Operations Division Chief Kevin Cronin told the board. The same account reports that the number of people with access to the system has been cut, and that a supervisor must now approve any hot list entry, which is a flag placed on a vehicle connected to a crime.
Cronin addressed the sharing of data directly, and News4JAX quoted him this way.
“We have shared data since the inception with agencies, law enforcement agencies all over the country. That is true. That was said here. That’s accurate. We have made changes that we no longer share data.”
The outlet reported that Cronin also told commissioners the system does not use facial recognition and does not collect data from cellphones, answering questions the board had raised.
The number that had not been published
The Florida Department of Transportation required the removal of the readers from state right of way and gave the agencies holding the permits 30 days to comply, a deadline that falls at the end of this month, according to News4JAX. How many of this county’s cameras that order reaches had not appeared in any public document until Tuesday.
Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick said roughly half of the department’s approximately 182 cameras would come down as a result, according to News4JAX. In a statement posted Aug. 13, and quoted the same day by the same outlet, the office said it “introduced license plate reader technology in 2017 and currently operates 180 cameras countywide.”
The removed cameras will not be put up on county right of way, Hardwick told the board, and News4JAX quoted him saying “we have no plans of putting them back up anywhere else.”
The statement the office published Sept. 2 is still on its public information page. It says the office is complying with the state memorandum, and it carries a passage the agency attributes to the sheriff.
“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.”
The agency’s news feed carries nothing about the cameras, and the newest item on it is dated Aug. 7. The Tattler put six written questions to the office on Sept. 11 with a deadline of 5 p.m. Sept. 14, and no answer to any of them has been received; several of the points the office made in public Tuesday go to what those questions asked.
What the board did, and what it did not do
Commissioner Christian Whitehurst argued for an immediate moratorium on the use of the cameras, citing privacy, according to News4JAX, which quoted him saying “I think we need to err on the side of privacy” and that the technology “might make people easier to catch, but it doesn’t keep us safe.”
The county attorney told commissioners that a formal moratorium may not be the appropriate mechanism, because the sheriff is a constitutional officer with statutory authority over the operations and equipment of his office, the outlet reported. The same account reports the attorney told the board it does control the sheriff’s budget and could look at options tied to county right of way permits.
The commission reached a consensus to spend two weeks reviewing legal options and to have staff report back before taking any action, according to News4JAX. Commissioner Clay Murphy was quoted saying he would “be more than happy to agree with the Sheriff to take these last two weeks to consider our options before we make a decision about that.”
No vote was taken on the cameras themselves.
The money, and the case the sheriff made for it
Hardwick asked the board not to strike the $500,000 set aside in the budget for the readers whatever it decides, saying the money could go to staffing instead, according to News4JAX. He named dispatchers, and the outlet reported he said their starting salaries have risen from $30,000 to $55,000 during his tenure.
For effectiveness he gave the board a set of counts he attributed to 2026, and News4JAX listed them as 29 stolen vehicles recovered, 23 stolen license tags recovered, 35 wanted persons arrested, 62 persons charged, 132 felony charges cleared, 54 misdemeanor charges cleared and 35 missing persons recovered. The office has not published those counts on either of the two pages it uses for agency statements, and no comparison against an earlier year accompanies them.
He also described two investigations in which he said the system pointed detectives at a vehicle, one of them a fatal hit and run and the other an assault case, according to the outlet’s account. News4JAX quoted him on what a reader does in an investigation: “It’s simply one lead, of a lot of other investigative techniques that have to be used.”
Two further points came out of the hearing. Hardwick and Cronin told commissioners that approximately 100 other license plate readers in the county are owned and operated by homeowner associations rather than by the Sheriff’s Office, and that the office’s own data is not available to community members, the outlet reported. Hardwick said he had attended a meeting in Orlando with more than 30 Florida sheriffs and is serving on a committee, selected by the governor’s office and the Florida Sheriffs Association, working toward statewide standards for the technology.
The state removal deadline falls at the end of this month. Two weeks from Tuesday is Sept. 29, and the county calendar gives the commission’s next regular meeting as 9 a.m. Oct. 6 in the County Auditorium. No minutes of either Sept. 15 meeting had been posted to the Clerk’s board records index when this was written.
You can ask for your own
Florida closed the plate reader database to the public in 2014 and made the closure permanent in 2019. Section 316.0777(3) of the state statutes makes images and data from an automated plate reader confidential and exempt both from the public records law and from the access provision in Article I of the state constitution, which means an agency is barred from releasing them rather than merely permitted to refuse a request for them.
The statute then names the only two disclosures it allows, and the second of them belongs to the registrant rather than to the agency. Section 316.0777(4)(b) provides that information relating to a plate registered to an individual may be disclosed to that individual, unless the information is active criminal intelligence or active criminal investigative information. A reader therefore has no route to what the cameras recorded of anybody else, and a clear one to what they recorded of a vehicle registered in the reader’s own name.
The Sheriff’s Office takes records requests through its portal at sjso.govqa.us, which its own public records page names as the place to file all of them. A request would give the plate, give the date range, and say that it is made by the registrant under section 316.0777(4)(b). The office told commissioners on Tuesday that it now holds the data for 30 days, so a request reaches a window that is both short and moving, and a day of delay is a day of records that are already gone.
The Tattler would like to see what comes back, at editor@stjohnstattler.org. Nothing would run without the sender’s agreement, and no plate number would appear in anything that did.
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