The government tells us it needs cameras to watch us to keep us safe, but it sure doesn’t seem to hold that principle when the tables are turned.
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by: Alex Flores
There may be a camera on a pole near your home right now, logging every time you drive by. It likely belongs to a company called Flock Safety, and police can search what it records without a warrant. Have you spoken up about it, or shown up at a council meeting to complain? According to Flock’s CEO, you’re not real.
At the end of October, Garrett Langley told a room full of police chiefs in Orlando that the backlash against his company was fake. According to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media, he blamed it on anonymous bots and suggested critics were being paid, with zero evidence.
But protests have popped up across the country. In Virginia, Henrico County ended its Flock contract early in October over privacy concerns. Reporters found local officers running Flock searches on behalf of federal immigration agents. In Florida, a woman was jailed after Flock cameras wrongly tied her to a deadly crash.
Langley also passed along some advice from his wife. “Never apologize.” Never mind that back in August, he admitted to The Verge that Flock got it wrong when officers used its cameras to stalk ex-partners. His wife’s advice stuck with me. Because around the same time, I saw a video of a mother in Louisville, Kentucky named Tiphanee Lee. She had learned what it looks like when an institution embodies those words.
A Mother’s Eyes and Ears
Tiphanee’s son Semaj has autism and doesn’t speak. He can’t come home from school and tell her about his day. What she got instead were repeated phone calls from Field Elementary. Staff kept describing her son as aggressive. But that wasn’t the boy she knew at home or at church. Semaj had been coming home unusually sad. None of it added up with what the school was describing.
The school has cameras in the halls, but not in the classrooms, so she asked to sit in the classroom and see what was going on for herself. The school said no. So on May 13 she wove a small camera deep into her son’s locs and sent him off to school.
With the camera buried in his hair, the picture doesn’t show much clearly, but the audio does. Tiphanee says the lead teacher stepped out, leaving an instructional assistant alone with her son. The recording captures that staff member yelling at Semaj. It ends with Semaj screaming. Tiphanee says the footage shows him being struck and called a racial slur while other adults in the room did nothing.
I watched the video of her walking into that school after she found the footage. I heard the tears in her voice. My first thought was of my own kids. How would I feel if I found out the school I send them to was allowing this to go on? And then I thought, what if, once it came out, the only thing the school did was try to sweep it under the rug?
The Only Rule Anyone Enforced
Staff found the camera around midday. Recording inside a classroom is against district policy, so the principal was called and Semaj was sent home for the rest of the day. On the very day a mother produced evidence that her son may have been abused, the first rule the school enforced was one against her and her son.
The district did open investigations. School police, Child Protective Services and district investigators all got involved. The staff member was barred from the building and reassigned away from children. The principal sent families a letter saying the school takes the allegations seriously and is following all district policies and procedures.
Nothing I’ve found from the school or the district apologizes to Semaj or his mother. Honestly, it looks like damage control and business as usual.
That was May. It’s now November. People all over the country have heard that recording. The man Tiphanee accuses has worked at that school since 2006. I can’t find a single public word from the district about what happened in that room or whether he’ll ever be back around children.
Who Gets Watched
Flock has tens of thousands of cameras on American roads. Police can search where a car has traveled, across state lines, without a warrant. Reporters have found local officers running those searches on behalf of federal agents. Others used them to stalk. The Washington Post counted at least 50 officers accused, charged or convicted of misusing plate readers to spy on people. One Florida officer searched his estranged wife’s car 717 times. Every family that drives past one of those poles gets logged, whether anyone suspects them of anything or not.
Meanwhile, Jefferson County Public Schools has no cameras in its classrooms at all. And a mother who asked to watch her own son for a single day was turned away.
The government can follow where you drive without asking a judge. But you can’t follow what happens to your own child in a building you pay for. The cameras point at individuals and families. They almost never point at the institutions that hold power over individuals and families.
Tiphanee is now calling for what she named Semaj’s Law, requiring cameras in classrooms that serve nonverbal and vulnerable children. Some will say anyone who opposes mass surveillance has to oppose that too, right? But look at which direction her cameras point. Flock watches everyone, everywhere, all the time, just in case you become a suspect. Tiphanee wants to see the handful of adults who hold power over a child who can’t speak for himself. She’s asking for a parent’s right to look. Whether a camera is the best tool for that is worth debating. But who gets to do the looking is the whole question.
What a Camera Can’t Do
Tiphanee’s hidden camera proved what she already knew in her gut. But look at what happened next. The evidence was in hand, and the institution still circled the wagons. A recording can expose what happened. It can’t make anyone take accountability for their actions.
It also shows how people act around a lens. The adults in that classroom knew there were no cameras. When people know they’re being recorded, many change. They watch what they say. They put on a different face. What they would have done anyway just moves somewhere the camera lens can’t reach. A whole country of license plate readers doesn’t make anyone more honest. It teaches people intent on doing harm where the blind spots are. And it makes new victims every time the system gets something wrong.
My ancestors had a different kind of watcher. Western Apache elders said the land “stalks” people. Places carried stories of people who did wrong and paid for it. Once you’d heard the story, that place reminded you every time you passed it. That watcher went everywhere you did.
Among the Ndé (Apache), you weren’t accountable to some distant authority. Leaders led by example and couldn’t just give orders. You answered to your family, your clan, the people around you, and the land itself. If someone did harm, the victim’s family decided what came next. They could accept a payment. They could punish the offender. Or they could settle it and let the matter end.
In that world, the harmed family had the final say. Tiphanee Lee still hasn’t been told what happened.
A man who sells cameras to police says the people pushing back aren’t real, and his advice is to never apologize. A school sent a little boy home for carrying the only honest witness in his classroom. Somewhere in Louisville, a mother is still waiting for someone to tell her she was right. She shouldn’t have had to hide a camera in her son’s hair to be believed.
Russell Means warned that everything the government practiced on Indian people would one day be brought home to the rest of America. He was right.
It’s up to us as parents to show up at our local school board and city council meetings. Fight these cameras where they’re being pointed at us. And push for them where they’re actually needed, holding those in power over us accountable to us.
I want my children to know real freedom someday, instead of this reservation we find ourselves in now.
Alex Flores is the Region 9 representative for the Libertarian National Committee
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