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In response to the District Attorney's statement and press release to the OBSERVER (Aug. 31, Sept. 2 and Sept. 5, 2026), it is immediately apparent that the facts behind the Flock camera program don't back up what the DA says. Here are four problems:
-- Crime is not going up. The DA says crime "has increased substantially." State data checked by the OBSERVER shows Fredonia police reported 293 crimes in 2003 and 163 in 2024 -- a drop of almost half. SUNY Fredonia, with its own police force, reports very low crime. The whole reason for the program rests on a trend that isn't happening.
-- Criminals are not fleeing the county. The DA says the cameras are needed because criminals cross county lines after a crime. Research shows most offenders act within a mile or two of home, and our local crime is mostly larceny -- by people who live here. His own example, an uncharged 2024 Dunkirk shooting, went uncharged because witnesses would not share doorbell video. Cameras don't fix that. In his statements to the OBSERVER, he has not named one local case the Flock network solved.
-- His safeguards don't protect us. "Only four people have access" covers who in his office can log in -- not who else in the country can search our data. He admitted that when he said his office can "audit who is looking at our footage."
His proposed monitoring group would meet with him four times a year with no authority to see records, stop searches, or end the contract. It will have no power to do anything. And when asked whether a resident could find out if a camera recorded his plate, the DA didn't know.
-- The rollout was not transparent. The village's own cameras on Village Hall, put up in public in response to mischief in Barker Common, are a closed local system. Flock reads every plate that passes and feeds it into a national network. Yet the District Attorney's office rolled the cameras out quietly, and the DA later apologized for how it came to light.
The office calls this a "Fredonia-Dunkirk" program, but the numbers say otherwise. One state grant paid for nine plate readers: seven are on private property in the Fredonia-Pomfret area and one is in Dunkirk. Separate funding paid for a tenth unit, a Flock video camera on village property. Trustees state they were never informed. The placement decisions were made by the District Attorney's office and seven private owners, with no public notice.
The DA has not shown that crime is rising, that outsiders are committing it, or that the cameras have solved anything. The Village Board should pass a resolution asking that the cameras be turned off until those questions are answered in public.
Susan Parker is a Fredonia resident.