Councilors Say They Have No Power Over Them
Adriana Vossari, RI & Local Government
Residents used the second public comment period at the
Westerly Town Council's Monday, August 17 meeting to object to automated
license-plate reading cameras in town, and councilors responded that the town
has no contract with the camera company and, by their own account, no direct
authority over the two devices now operating here.
The exchange, captured in the Westerly Town Council's
published meeting recording, produced one concrete factual point from the town
manager: the town has never subscribed to the license-plate reader service,
does not hold a contract with it, and its own downtown and beach camera footage
stays in municipal hands. The practical takeaway for residents is that the
cameras they are worried about are not the town's to switch off.
What the speakers said
A lifelong Westerly resident, speaking before the council
for the first time, said he was driven to attend out of "grave
concern" over the growing presence of the cameras. He told the council
that communities nationwide have canceled contracts or banned the devices, and
cited the Institute for Justice's tally of more than 100 documented cases of
license-plate reader abuse. He said South Kingstown had become the 100th
community to reject the readers, attributing that count to a camera-tracking project,
and referenced a Rhode Island lawsuit over a wrongful arrest he said stemmed
from a false positive. Those figures are his characterizations; the transcript
contains no independent verification of them.
He also raised data-sharing, citing a 2018 Electronic
Frontier Foundation study he said found only a fraction of a percent of scans
are tied to public safety, and said some municipalities had shared data with
more than 800 agencies. He said the company shortened its default data
retention period from 30 days to seven, but called the changes minimal.
Crucially, he acknowledged the limits of local power. "I understand that these are privately owned cameras and therefore we are limited in what we can do," he said, asking councilors to weigh public sentiment if the company expands, and to vote no if the town is ever offered its own contract. He said he had heard the state has a contract that would add more cameras, with towns voting on it — a claim the transcript does not confirm.
A second speaker, who said she does most of her business in
Westerly, told the council she would support such cameras if she trusted the
system, and drew a comparison to surveillance expansion in China. "I think
it's a bad idea to have these," she said.
A Westerly resident who spoke later identified where he
believed the two cameras point — one toward a shopping plaza entrance, the
other toward a stop sign at a home-improvement store lot — and said, "Why
are they there? It's probably for ICE." He questioned the training and
vetting of federal immigration officers. That is his opinion, not an
established fact about the cameras' purpose.
Another resident who gave his address on a Westerly lane
focused on artificial intelligence. He argued that so-called agentic AI can
compile a person's routine, workplace, home and habits from plate scans, and
said the result is "closer to stalking than it is anything else." He
said the technology does most of the work for a bad actor, and objected that
the data sits under no privacy framework comparable to health-records law.
Councilors say their hands are tied
In the council's response period, Rose Van Dover said she
had researched the company and read from her notes, describing a network of
cloud-connected, solar-powered readers that log plates along with vehicle make,
model, color and identifying marks such as bumper stickers and dents. She cited
figures of more than 100,000 cameras nationally and partnerships with thousands
of law enforcement agencies, and referenced American Civil Liberties Union
arguments that the data is stored with little oversight. Those figures are as
she stated them.
"We should, as a town council in this town, we should
be able to take a vote to get rid of any of these cameras," Van Dover
said. She said she had been told the camera at the home-improvement store is
owned by the retailer itself and that the one at the wholesale club is a state
police camera, adding that she was "not sure we can do anything about
that." She also said five more of the cameras sit within about a half-mile
of the town line on the road toward Connecticut, and said "nothing we can
do about it from here."
A councilor who described first learning of the retailer's
camera said he immediately went to the town manager and was told the town holds
no contract. He urged residents to look at where that company donates
politically, and said the situation "pisses me off," pledging to
raise the issue at the state level and to act on anything that reaches his
desk. Michael T. Niemeyer's and William J. Aiello's remarks on the item were
limited; Aiello said he has "never been a big proponent of having cameras
everywhere," noting police can reach agreements to access private footage.
He described a "slippery slope," saying present-day good intentions
do not guarantee restraint in five, ten or fifteen years.
Van Dover, responding to the resident who linked the cameras
to immigration enforcement, said she was not sure what the cameras have to do
with ICE and added, "if you had to ask me, yes, I want ice here."
Another councilor closed his remarks by telling immigrants, green card holders
and seasonal workers, "You are welcome here. You belong in Westerly."
The town manager's account
Pressed by the chair, the town manager said flatly that the
town does not and never has held a contract with the camera company. He said
the town owns its own camera system downtown and at the beach, purchased partly
with roughly $600,000 in grant money and shared with the school system, and
that downloading footage runs through a police department protocol. "We
own the data. It does not get shared with anybody," he said.
He identified the third-party resale of scan data as the
core problem — describing vehicle and pedestrian demographics being packaged
for marketing firms, "unbeknownst to the people that have
subscribed." He said he did not agree with that sharing. At the same time
he defended the investigative value of cameras generally, saying downtown
cameras have helped resolve most hit-and-run cases there, and comparing the
technology to police body cameras and the thousands of doorbell cameras on
Westerly homes, whose data handling he said he could not account for.
He confirmed the camera on the Route 1 stretch is operated
by state police, which he said monitors readers along the highways.
What happens next
No motion was made and no vote was taken on the cameras. By
multiple councilors' own statements, the two devices in town are outside the
council's direct control — one privately owned, one state-run — leaving
residents' requests aimed at a future contract that has not been offered.
Residents who want the issue formally before the council would need it placed
on a future agenda; the council's next scheduled discussion date mentioned
during the meeting was August
31, for the unrelated short-term rental drafts.
