As a Woodstock native, I am concerned by the city’s push for surveillance cameras on our historic Square. After observing the recent City Council session, I found the advocacy for this “public safety” apparatus to be a disappointing departure from principles of limited government the Mayor has long championed.

The presentation felt less like a policy debate and more like a sales pitch. Using fear-mongering anecdotes to justify the erosion of privacy is concerning. Moving freely without being logged into a persistent, searchable database is a fundamental right; bypassing that right for a sense of security is the antithesis of individual sovereignty.

The choice between vendors like Flock Safety and Modern Media Tech is a false one. Both fundamentally alter the character of our community. Data suggests that public CCTV rarely deters crime, merely displacing it while creating an infrastructure prone to “mission creep,” eventually leading to facial recognition and behavioral flagging.

It is particularly telling that the council has prioritized a vendor’s pitch over the expertise of local engineers and cybersecurity professionals who voiced grave concerns. Woodstock deserves a leader who remains firm when corporations offer to trade municipal privacy for surveillance contracts.

If the council pursues this, it must immediately form a Community Technology Oversight Committee comprised of local experts, not law enforcement or vendors, to audit these tools for privacy risks. Abandoning principled consistency the moment a conceptual threat becomes a legislative reality is a failure of governance. We should keep the Square a place of genuine, unobserved community.

Matt Carmichael

Woodstock