Tiverton does not need more surveillance cameras — and the town council should reject any proposal to add them.

I care about public safety. I am a parent, I have a degree in criminal justice, and I grew up watching true crime before it was a genre. I understand why people hear "camera" and "missing child" and think, well, maybe we need that. But public safety cannot be the only question. The real question is risk versus benefit — and in Tiverton, the benefit has not been clearly proven, yet the risk is very clear.

Tiverton is already a safe community. Before expanding surveillance, we should have clear, measurable answers: What problem are these cameras solving? What outcomes are expected? How will success be measured? So far, no one has made a strong, metric-based case.

At roughly $23,000, we should also ask whether this is the best use of our money. That same amount could fund a late bus for students, sidewalks at Bliss Four Corners, streetlight maintenance, or DPW equipment. Sidewalks are public safety. Lighting is public safety. Those investments benefit residents every single day.

My deepest concern, though, is privacy.

The ACLU of Rhode Island has raised serious concerns about Flock cameras, including the absence of meaningful guardrails in state law governing data access, sharing, retention, and future use. That should worry all of us — not because police can't be trusted today, but because today's stated use is not guaranteed to be tomorrow's use. Technology evolves. Policies change. Data-sharing agreements expand. Once those images and movement patterns are in the system, we cannot unring that bell.

These cameras are called license plate readers, but they are wide-angle cameras that capture everything in frame. Your face. Your child's face. Your routines, your patterns, your daily movement through town. There is no opt-in process. There is no way to say, "Please do not track my child." This is not targeted collection from people suspected of a crime. It is broad surveillance of people who have done nothing wrong.

I have spent nearly a decade training machines on data and imagery identification in the healthcare space. I have seen machines identify patterns far outside the intended visual area. The point is this: if an image is gathered by the system, the system can learn from it. The camera does not only "see" what we say we are interested in.

Supporters compare Flock cameras to private home cameras. That comparison doesn't hold. Private cameras are not feeding into a centralized platform, tracking movement across precincts and states, or building searchable profiles of residents over time. That is a fundamentally different kind of surveillance.

Portsmouth unanimously rejected Flock cameras over privacy concerns. Warren denied a State Police request for the same reasons. If our neighbors can say "this is too much," so can we.

I urge the people of the Farmcoast and the town councils of Tiverton and Little Compton to reject these cameras. And invest our limited budget in things that genuinely improve life in Farmcoast — not in a surveillance system residents never agreed to join.

V.A. Lopes

Tiverton