St. Johns County sheriff wants $3.9M raise for deputies but residents want answers on LPR

Our Take

Credit to News4JAX for capturing something we see over and over: a routine budget hearing turns into an impromptu public hearing on surveillance because nobody gave residents a real one. Commissioners sat down to talk property tax rates and deputy pay, and instead got an earful about Flock Safety cameras quietly logging every car that passes through St. Johns County. That's not a tangent — it's the public doing the oversight job elected officials skipped.

This is the pattern nationwide: ALPR contracts get signed in budget line items or vendor demos, not in open debates about retention windows, who can query the data, or whether local cops are feeding plate scans into federal immigration or out-of-state abortion investigations. Taxpayers are being asked to fund raises and new tech in the same breath, with almost no accounting of what the existing camera network has actually done for public safety versus what it's done to privacy. Residents showing up to ask pointed questions at a tax hearing is a sign the normal channels — FOIA requests, council agendas, sheriff's office transparency reports — aren't cutting it.

If you're in St. Johns County or anywhere else wondering how many Flock cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map before you assume it's just a handful of intersections. And if you want to push your own commissioners to answer the same questions St. Johns County residents are asking, our take-action page has the templates to make it harder for them to dodge.