By Tim Perry
The original version of this post appeared on the Sedona Bulletin Board on Friday, Aug. 1.
Sedona, AZ — As a reminder, the Sedona City Council has tentatively scheduled a special meeting for Wednesday, Aug. 13, at 3 p.m., at which city staff will endeavor to “educate” residents on why it’s a good thing that the city is building tracking maps of their every movement and giving that data to a private corporation to be used to advance its “Minority Report” agenda. Mark your calendars.
City staff’s recent purchase of license plate tracking cameras with zero public consultation isn’t about safety. It’s about the insatiable hunger of power hungry bureaucrats to exercise as much control as possible over as many people as possible—over as great an area as possible, not just in Sedona.
The Sedona cameras are part of a systemic regional process to create a totalitarian police state in what was once open range beyond state control.
Sedona’s cameras will interface with Cottonwood’s and the county’s and in due course the state’s new cameras along I-17, all of the feeds from which will eventually be routed through the state’s new surveillance center manned by Embry-Riddle students—with the explicit goal, as Sen. Mark Finchem gleefully stated a few months ago, of creating a CIA-style operation enabling the bureaucrats to track us to the extent that they will be able to send cops to our houses if they merely suspect us of associating with someone suspected of associating with someone suspected of a crime.
The better to scare us into subservience, of course. And in Sedona, the superstitious, pseudoscientific, discriminatory, anti-freedom council will also use the camera data to attempt to force drivers and pedestrians to take only the routes they want with the goal of discriminating against visitors in favor of elitist residents and against humans in favor of inanimate objects.
There is no defensible justification for these cameras in a town with falling population and crime where members of the police department commit around 89% of documented violence.
From any viewpoint that prioritizes freedom and ethics, the city’s purchase of these cameras looks like nothing so much as a means to facilitate further official intimidation, manipulation, and terrorism.
They are another attack on traditional Western values and another attack on the early American ideal, so forcibly stated by Benjamin Franklin, that no pragmatic concern can ever take precedence over individual liberty, regardless of what the consequences of that liberty might be.
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