Dear Staunton City Council,

As a citizenry we are thankful for the decision to end the contract with Flock's license plate surveillance and remove all the cameras. This completes numbers 1 through 4 of our original requests. We are hopeful you, the city council, will agree that we do not want to have to go through this again. However, considering that Chief Williams has been with the SPD for 41 years he will no doubt be retiring retiring relatively soon. Moreover, City Councils come and go, and people forget.

Therefore, we are now focusing our efforts on having an ordinance drawn up and passed. Ideally this ordinance requires city council input and rigorous public debate prior to the implementation of surveillance systems by the City Of Staunton or outright prohibits mass surveillance by the city of Staunton.

While we continue to support reasonable efforts to ensure public safety, we have grave concerns about the broad and lasting implications of having a series of cameras that track nearly all citizens coming in to and leaving our city despite nearly all being innocent people. We also have concerns about facial recognition technology and other forms of mass surveillance. We as human beings have a right to privacy and our fourth amendment to the constitution enshrines his right to travel without being followed and documented as we go about our travels in daily life.

To date we are unaware of any transparent, inclusive process of Q and A to discuss this with the citizens of Staunton. Systems of this level have long lasting affects on Staunton's citizens and their relationship with its government as well as civil liberties, privacy and public trust.

At this point we want the following actions:

1) Ban Automatic License Plate Readers in the city of Staunton.

or

2) Pass an ordinance requiring city council input and a lengthy, well publicized, rigorous public debate from Staunton citizens with all viewpoints.

Sincerely,

Staunton Citizens.