Your recent article on Bowling Green’s license plate readers offers welcome transparency, but transparency about surveillance is not the same as safety from it. Even by the police department’s own admission, this technology is routinely abused elsewhere; and there’s no reason to assume Bowling Green is immune.
Consider the examples buried in your own reporting: a Milwaukee officer criminally charged for using camera data to stalk a woman he was dating and her ex. Three Arizona cities now investigating officers who misused the cameras, including one allegedly tracking his own wife. Two Reynoldsburg officers who resigned after one used the system more than 40 times to hunt down a former partner. These aren’t hypothetical slippery-slope arguments; they are documented outcomes of exactly this technology, deployed by police departments that surely also promised “responsible use.”
Deputy Chief Skaff says BGPD hasn’t shared data with ICE and logs every search. Good. But policies are not guarantees, and audit trails only catch misuse after it’s already happened. A network of cameras logging every driver’s movements through town is a permanent record waiting for the wrong person to access it: an abusive officer, a subpoena, a future administration with different values than today’s.
Benjamin Franklin warned us long ago: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Solving shopliftings and hit-skips does not require building infrastructure for mass tracking. Bowling Green should be asking not just “how do we use this responsibly,” but “should we have it at all.”
Steven Hudson
Bowling Green
