ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – Is it a helpful tool to solve crime, or an encroachment on civil liberties? Surveillance and doorbell cameras seem to be everywhere, and now local sheriffs are asking homeowners and business owners who have them to essentially — connect.
The law
From tracking down porch pirates to keeping an eye on unwanted guests, security or doorbell cameras can come in handy to a home or business owner. They can also be helpful for law enforcement that is investigating crimes.
News4JAX first wanted to understand the law. Jacksonville criminal defense attorney Curtis Fallgatter told the I-TEAM, just because video exists, that doesn’t necessarily mean police can use it.
“If police ask for your home or business surveillance video, do you have to give it to them?” News4JAX asked.
“No, it’s an issue of the Fourth Amendment,” Fallgatter said.
The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
Fallgatter said law enforcement needs one of two things to watch your surveillance video: Your consent or a warrant. That means there would need to be probable cause the video would show evidence of a crime being committed.
RELATED: Know when police can get your Ring video
Sheriffs in both St. Johns and Duval counties want your consent and want you to sign up for their public safety camera programs: Connect St. Johns or Connect Duval.
Both programs have two levels to choose from. Level one lets police know you have cameras so they can contact you for footage if needed. Level two lets you integrate your cameras to give police direct access.
While Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters first announced “Connect Duval” last week at his Town Hall, the “Connect St. Johns” program has been up and running since May.
Connect St. Johns
As of Wednesday morning, Connect St. Johns had 493 registered cameras and 677 integrated cameras. Those numbers are continuously updated as more residents and businesses sign up.
St. Johns County Sheriff Robert Hardwick said if you consent to sharing surveillance video, you don’t have to hand over all of it. For example, you could give the Sheriff’s Office access to the surveillance from the front door but not elsewhere in the building.
Hardwick told the I-TEAM he and his team want to make giving consent easy and workable, as it’s an extremely useful tool for law enforcement.
“Hopefully solve the crime a lot quicker than we normally would with the old school way of, you know, knocking on your doors and kind of saying, ‘Hey, do you have any cameras?’ he explained.
To register on Connect St Johns:
- Go to ConnectStJohns.org
- Click “Camera Registration” on home page
- Scroll down to click “Register Your Camera”
- Enter your contact information
- Enter your address
- Add the number of internal and/or external cameras you want to register
- Hit submit
Once you’re registered, here’s how it works. Let’s say there’s a hit-and-run in your neighborhood. At the county’s Real Time Information Center, investigators can pull up a map and see if anyone in the area has registered their home surveillance cameras on the platform which is represented by blue camera icons on the screen.
The sheriff’s office can then quickly send an email asking the camera’s owner to upload the video that may help them find the culprit, but Hardwick said it’s up to the owner if they want to share it or not.
“Some of the clarity is that we don’t have access to your camera,” Hardwick said about owners who choose to register their cameras. “The bigger our database gets, the quicker we can solve crime.”
The next level, which has so far been a more popular option on Connect St. John, is integration. (To sign up to integrate your cameras, register first and then select “Camera Integration” at the top of the home page and follow the similar steps).
Integration allows the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office to have direct access to surveillance video to help them solve crimes. It uses a piece of hardware to link the camera owner’s security feeds to the sheriff’s office.
So far, Hardwick said just businesses have joined this level. The sheriff said the video will only be accessed by the analysts, detectives and supervisors at their Real Time Intelligence Center, and the sheriff said they will keep an open line of communication with the camera’s owners and business managers.
Hardwick said the sheriff’s office will contact you every time before accessing your camera.
But Hardwick said, there could be a rare, real-time emergency that requires immediate access.
“I hate to maybe use this example, let’s say we have a homicide in progress, I think the business owner would understand that if we didn’t call them first,” he said.
“How can businesses who’ve registered with this make sure that their surveillance video isn’t being accessed by a bad actor that’s not the sheriff’s office?” News4JAX asked, regarding those signing up for the integrated option.
“When you actually go to Connect St. John and then also to our real-time intelligence personnel will actually walk the people through the system that we’re actually using,” Hardwick said. “It is a secured cloud that we’re using for other databases now as we speak.”
According to the sheriff’s office, this network of cameras is only accessible to a select group of people assigned to the Intelligence Unit, and authorized login metadata will be tracked and logged.
As for public access to those integrated cameras, the sheriff’s office and Fallgatter said the only way the surveillance video in this program would be released publicly is if it’s used as evidence in a trial.
Privacy concerns
This vast network of business surveillance cameras may also mean that video capturing you at a store, gas station, or hotel is part of the integrated camera system at the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. But, you might not know because the cameras’ locations aren’t shared publicly unless the business consents to that information being released.
Privacy advocates, like Albert Fox Cahn with New York-based non-profit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), say this is encroaching into the territory of unreasonable searches.
“Many of the legal scholars who study this think it’s unconstitutional when you go from having a single camera to having this panopticon that can track you across an entire city. But this is something that the courts really haven’t wrestled with yet,” he said.
But Hardwick said they are not there to spy, it’s to help with investigations and help solve crimes.
“We’re not just going to monitor and basically get on these cameras unless we have a crime that’s been committed,” he said.
Connect Duval
Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters announced the launch of the similar program Connect Duval during his Town Hall on July 19. In one week, 815 cameras have been registered. Integration signups are underway, too.
Duval County residents and business owners:
- Go to ConnectDuval.org
- To register your cameras, click “Camera Registration” at the top of the home page
- Scroll down to click “Register Your Camera”
- Enter your contact information
- Enter your address
- Add the number of internal and/or external cameras you want to register
- Hit submit
- To integrate, complete the registration process then select “Camera Integration” at the top of the home page and follow the steps.
I-TEAM investigator Vic Micolucci is speaking with leadership at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office about Connect Duval and the agency’s plans for how cameras will be used by JSO officers. Watch Vic’s report Thursday night on News4JAX at 6 p.m.