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North Brentwood officials face resident privacy concerns over new surveillance cameras
Summary
Residents at the April 6 North Brentwood mayor and council meeting pressed officials for details about four newly installed street cameras — asking about audio, facial recognition, contract terms, county access and equity for deaf residents. Officials said cameras were funded with ARPA, view public streets only, and promised contract details and technical fixes by the next meeting.
The North Brentwood mayor and town council heard more than an hour of public comment on April 6 about four newly installed street surveillance cameras, with residents pressing for clarity on whether the devices record audio or use facial-recognition software and who can access the footage.
Mayor said the cameras were placed to ‘‘capture the sidewalk and the street’’ and told the meeting they ‘‘do not record audio, and they do not have facial recognition.’’ She said the units were funded from the town’s ARPA allotment and listed their locations as 39th & Allison, 39th & Windham, 40th & Webster and 41st Avenue & Wallace Road.
Residents offered mixed views. Some said cameras would have assisted police in past incidents and could deter crime. ‘‘A car parked in front of my home was stripped of all four tires,’’ one resident said, citing recent local thefts. Others raised legal and privacy worries. ‘‘These are a big privacy violation,’’ said a resident who asked that his comments about facial-recognition be emphasized; he said camera angles already include house entrances.
An assistant director at Prince George’s County Homeland Security, Anthony Reese, described options for municipal partnerships with the county’s Real Time Crime Center and said municipalities ‘‘can set parameters’’ on how and when feeds are shared. Reese told the council that municipalities can register cameras and choose whether to allow live viewing by county staff, which can then aid officers responding to in-progress incidents.
Experts and residents urged the town to publish the vendor contract and data policy. A local researcher working in AI governance said it was important for the town to ‘‘share the agreement that we’ve signed with this company’’ and to specify what is recorded, how footage is stored and whether federal agencies could request access. A deaf resident said sign-language conversations on sidewalks raised an equity concern because visual capture could reveal private exchanges that audio systems do not.
Council members and the mayor said the camera deployment was unfinished: they acknowledged the cameras were active before all positioning and signage were finalized and said contractors must complete adjustments. The mayor said staff are working to ensure the cameras point only at public areas, to turn off flashing indicator lights and to post required signage. She also said the town has not yet fixed a formal retention period but that ‘‘most of the retention periods are 30 days’’ on similar systems.
No formal vote was taken on the cameras. The mayor said the town will respond to public-record requests for the contract and expects to provide residents with written answers and additional details by the next meeting. The council also asked the vendor about technical options to deactivate recording while repositioning cameras if that can be done without preventing necessary adjustments.
