Solar panel left that powered a Flock camera at 25th and Orange Ave. in Fort Pierce, Fla.
Well, this is comforting.
St. Lucie County went looking for license-plate cameras along its roads and discovered something you generally hope your government already knows:
There were surveillance cameras out there nobody could account for.
The county found 14 cameras without county permits. The Sheriff’s Office eventually raised its hand and said three were theirs.
That leaves 11 mystery cameras.
Neither Fort Pierce nor Port St. Lucie police has claimed them.
One of the unpermitted cameras was reported around 25th Street in Fort Pierce. Another was at Orange Avenue and 25th Street.
Now 25th Street is not exactly an unknown quantity to law enforcement. The corridor has seen its share of drug investigations and other police activity over the years.
So there is an obvious question:
Did a federal law-enforcement agency put any of these cameras there?
We don’t know.
There is no evidence so far that the DEA, FBI, ATF, ICE or any other federal agency owns one of the mystery cameras.
But when you find surveillance equipment on a public road and the county government, Sheriff’s Office and two city police departments can’t tell you whose it is, asking who else might be watching seems less like conspiracy theory and more like basic journalism.
And then it gets better.
The Washington Post went looking for one of the unpermitted cameras on 25th Street.
It was gone.
The county’s notice was apparently still attached to the pole.
The camera wasn’t.
Apparently somebody knew who owned it well enough to take it down.
It just wasn’t the county.
Flock Safety, the company whose license-plate-reader system is at the center of this controversy, says it has contacted St. Lucie County and is willing to help sort things out.
Good.
Because these aren’t birdhouses.
License-plate readers collect information about vehicles moving along our roads. Somebody pays for them. Somebody gets the data. Somebody decides who can search it.
Which brings us to a few old-fashioned questions:
Who bought these 11 cameras?
Who installed them?
Who paid the bills?
Who had access to what they collected?
Did they share that information with anybody else?
And why were surveillance cameras installed on St. Lucie County public rights-of-way without St. Lucie County knowing who put them there?
Maybe there is a perfectly ordinary explanation.
I hope so.
But first somebody has to explain it.
Until then, St. Lucie County has managed to stumble into a wonderfully modern American mystery:
We found the cameras.
We just don’t know who was watching.