In recent months, local law enforcement agencies, including the Bend Police Department, Redmond Police and the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office, have considered adding new video surveillance technology — or replacing cast-off technology — that helps them monitor the community and ostensibly better solve crimes.
Given the breadth of information coming at us about privacy and technology, these agencies have, and should, take their time in considering all of the implications before signing on the dotted line. As recent Source reporting showed, there’s much to be concerned about when law enforcement agencies — whether through willfulness or by mistake — open up the data they’ve collected for other agencies to procure. In the case of Bend PD, a simple oversight on a toggle switch opened up the department’s Automated License Plate Reader data to federal immigration authorities, which accessed Bend’s data 279 times in a matter of weeks.
A public record request made by the Oregon Law Center helped the Source uncover that local oversight. Similar databases (this time, driver and criminal records) factored into a recent lawsuit by the Rural Organizing Project against the Oregon State Police. In the suit, the ROP alleges that OSP has shared data with federal immigration authorities for years, in apparent violation of the state’s sanctuary laws.
As scrutiny and public interest increases, local law enforcement agencies are correct in exercising a bit more caution as they move ahead with implementing new technologies.
In the case of Bend PD, city leaders this month moved to add a discussion over a new set of surveillance cameras to the City Council agenda — where the public will be able to weigh in — rather than leaving the decision behind closed doors. As more recent Source reporting indicated, the city manager would have been within his right to simply approve the new cameras, since it amounted to only an addition to an existing contract. The fact that he didn’t points to an increasing amount of understanding of the sensitive nature of such decisions. Just because they can be done out of the light of day, doesn’t mean they should.
Deschutes County, meanwhile, is right now considering the addition of these same Axon technologies (notably, in-vehicle ALPR cameras) to its inventory. The item was on a County agenda last week, but got moved to this week — ostensibly because the issue needed more consideration to account for a new state law that mandates these vendors ensure end-to-end encryption, which means the access keys remain solely in the hands of the subscriber and not in those of a for-profit corporation.
Back in 2020, when George Floyd’s name was on everyone’s lips, the public called loudly for more officers to wear body cameras. Many departments, including several in Central Oregon, added them. But what we welcomed in the name of police accountability has now opened the door for all kinds of other surveillance — and the same people who clamored for body camera footage may now be dismayed how the companies providing those cameras are also, increasingly, expanding their offerings around surveillance.
There are some who will say, “if you’re not breaking the rules, you don’t have to be worried.” But as every asylum seeker who came to America and followed the rules knows, the rules can be changed at any time.
For that reason, we should welcome our local governments being as careful, and of course transparent, as they need to be as they weigh personal privacy — and the sanctity of our sanctuary laws — with public safety.
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