
If you’ve been spanning the Wabash River Memorial Bridge on your way to Posey County or Evansville, you may have noticed a camera just as you enter the Hoosier state. Travel a bit further and as soon as you enter Mt. Vernon city limits, you’ll find another parked next to the road near the Four Seasons Inn and RV Park. According to Posey County Sheriff Tom Latham, there are five total throughout Posey County and at least two in Mt. Vernon. Their purpose however, turns out isn’t what some thought. The cameras drew the ire of some in Illinois who had heard or were concerned they were speed check cameras and reached out to WROY/WRUL News for details.
Latham says they’re actually Flock cameras and don’t measure speed at all. So what are they doing?
Flock cameras are a technology that provides us with readable and video footage of vehicles license plates, that’s all it does. And when you use the Flock camera system, other agencies if we grant access and they grant us access, we are able to from here to California to Florida to Maine, if anyone has flock systems and we ask to join their system, that opens up a huge, huge networking capability for law enforcement agencies to interact within the system.
Furthermore, instituting them and even coming to terms with how he felt about utilizing them was a multi-year process. Some individuals feel uneasy about the prospect of being surveilled without permission. There’s no way to opt out of having your vehicle data and location history tracked by Flock. Those are concerns Latham shared and he calls himself a constitutional sheriff.
I had sat on this thing for about 3 years before I finally made the move. I don’t like the government spying on a person if you will in the sense of doing it illegally. The more government interference in my opinion, the more problems we develop.
The positive potential of utilizing the technology is great. From helping find missing, possibly kidnapped individuals to helping solve crimes faster by being able to immediately locate a vehicle’s whereabouts. The cameras uses also extend to illegal immigration and that’s what tipped Latham over the edge he says.
When you talk about safety and security of your area and the amount of illegal immigration that our country has endured over the last 4 years and I’ll speak to that because four other sheriffs and I actually went down to Del Rio, Texas and went with the border patrol about 3 years ago. So we saw how things were being done and how things were getting into our communities. We’re all essentially border states at this point. We’re all dealing with the influx of immigration. Hopefully that’s going to be coming to a lower point. Going back to understanding my mentality of seeing how what the border agents call “gotaways” helped solidify my decision on implementing these Flock cameras.
White County doesn’t currently employ Flock cameras according to Sheriff Jordan Weiss. Latham says Illinois politics make it so even if White County did, it presents additional issues devolving into a red state/blue state debacle.
The people from Illinois I love; they are good people. But my land, the legislative branch in that state has lost their mind. Because we can get Flock footage from Illinois, but here’s the catch. If it has anything to do with immigration in a case, we can’t use it. In order to gain access to the Flock cameras, an agency would have to sign an agreement saying that they would not use it for that purpose.
Ultimately, Latham says it’s about protecting and serving the people he was elected to serve.
The whole point to this is to provide the most safe and secure area that we can. And if we have bad people coming through our areas, we want to know about it. I want to know about it. It’s my obligation to know about it.
If you have additional questions about the Flock cameras Posey County is utilizing, Sheriff Latham says he welcomes folks to call his office at 812-838-1320 and reiterates he’d much rather tell individuals what’s really going on than see misinformation spread on social media.