The Board of County Commissioners voted 3 to 2 on Tuesday afternoon to revoke the Sheriff’s Office permits for license plate readers in county rights of way. Jacksonville Today puts the number at some 45 cameras along county-maintained roads, and the county itself publishes no count. Commissioners Sarah Arnold, Ann Taylor and Christian Whitehurst carried the measure, and Chair Clay Murphy and Commissioner Krista Joseph voted against it. News4JAX reports that no timeline was discussed for the removal of the cameras, and neither account carries a date by which the agency must take any camera down.
The vote followed a discussion that Jacksonville Today reports ran two hours, and that outlet reports opponents of the cameras outnumbered supporters among the speakers. This paper had no reporter in the room and relies on two published accounts for everything said at the meeting. Each of the two is named in the source notes against the particular facts it supplies.
What the vote does not reach
The decision authorizes removal from county-maintained roads, and two categories of plate reader in this county stand outside it. Cameras in state rights of way were already coming down under the order this paper reported on Sept. 11. That order is FDOT Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, and it set a deadline of Sept. 30 for the permittees.
Cameras in communities governed by homeowners associations and community development districts are untouched by Tuesday’s vote. Jacksonville Today reports that those cameras may remain where they are and may go on sharing what they read with the Sheriff’s Office. The vote therefore does not end automated plate reading in St. Johns County and does not end the Sheriff’s Office receiving it. It ends the county’s permission for the agency’s own cameras to stand on the county’s own roads.
What the agency told the board
The Sheriff’s Office sent the director of its criminal investigations division to make the case for keeping the cameras. Howard Cole told the board that the agency had reevaluated its guidelines and conducted an audit. He said the result is that data is held for less time and shared with fewer outside agencies than before.
“We were sharing with 2,600 other law enforcement agencies, not all of whom had the same policies as us,” Cole said, in Jacksonville Today’s account. “As we stand here today, we share with zero agencies,” he told the board, and put the number with access at 70 people inside his own agency. He said any outside agency wanting that data would have to go through a supervisor and an analyst to get it. Cole said the agency would resume sharing statewide only if the Legislature passed regulation of the technology.
Cole put a number of cases to the board in which the cameras helped identify a suspect. Among them was the armed bank robbery of Oct. 16, which this paper reported on Sunday. The Sheriff’s Office says a vehicle was located within about fifteen minutes of that robbery being reported. The same account states that the agency’s audit identified a single personal use of the system by its own personnel. It was a detective who queried the database to see whether a used vehicle he had bought was being delivered.
What the commissioners said
All three commissioners who voted to revoke the permits stressed their support for law enforcement, according to Jacksonville Today. Two of them put the objection in terms of regulation rather than of the technology itself.
Whitehurst said he would favor bringing the cameras back once Florida lawmakers “put guardrails on this technology,” and Arnold said “the technology has outpaced the safeguards.” Joseph, who voted to keep the cameras, called their removal a “radical” position and said she would not “jeopardize one child in this county.”
Among the speakers who supported the cameras was the father of a girl who was killed in 2021. He told the board that he feels safer knowing the agency tracks license plates. Among those opposed, one speaker said that “we are not here asking to be less safe” but asking for measures “that respect our constitutional rights.” The same speaker said law-abiding taxpayers “should not be forced to fund a mass surveillance system that monitors everyone by default.”
Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick has defended the program since the state order came down in September. The sentence of his that Jacksonville Today carries in Tuesday’s report was said to that outlet in the summer and not at this meeting. It is that a person not committing violent crimes and not wanted for one has nothing to hide.
The record this vote has produced so far
The county has published no video of Tuesday’s meeting, and the clerk’s meeting index carried 22 rows when this paper checked it on Tuesday afternoon. Twenty-one of those rows had a video against them, and the one that did not was 10/20/26.
There are no minutes either, and there will not be for some weeks, because minutes of a regular meeting are approved at a later meeting. The county calendar lists the next two regular meetings as Nov. 3 and Nov. 17, both at 9 a.m. in the County Auditorium.
The figure of some 45 cameras reaches a reader of this paper as a number an outlet reports and not as a number the county publishes. This newsroom reported on Oct. 17 that the county publishes no count of plate readers standing in a county right of way. That remains true on the day the board voted to revoke the permits for them.
The backup filed with the item the board acted on was a single county agenda item form dated Oct. 6 from the County Attorney. None of the nine documents the Sheriff’s Office published on Oct. 13 was attached to it. The heading on that form reading SUGGESTED MOTION, RECOMMENDATION, ACTION was followed by no text at all.
The Tattler sent six written questions to the Sheriff’s Office about this program on Sept. 11, with a stated deadline of Sept. 14. None of the six has been answered, which is thirty-nine days, and the offer to run any answer at the top of the story stands. This paper will publish the minutes and the recording against this account when the county produces them.
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