More than 20 public commenters railed against Lawrence city commissioners Tuesday night for approving a camera integration program the city rolled out last month without public input.
The police department announced the Axon Fusus program last month. It has two components, including an option for residents to register their security cameras with the police and an integration option allowing businesses to purchase a custom device and subscription enabling the police department live access to camera feeds.
Experts have said the program constitutes a violation of community privacy. Commenters brought up a host of concerns Tuesday, including data security, environmental impacts, AI errors and privacy protections.
Some spoke on an issue raised by experts about how Axon’s business strategy encourages cities to purchase more of their technology while making it harder to back out.
Mazzy Martinez said Axon starts by selling items the community supports, like body cameras, but then rolls in its larger programs like the Fusus program.
“Even the police department, I don’t believe, truly understands the full scope of this technology,” Martinez said.
The Lawrence Transparency Project, a local advocacy group pushing back on the Fusus program, has started a petition that has garnered more than 350 signatures asking the city to stop the program and provide opportunity for public input.
“I cannot stress how vast, and what a large infrastructure of surveillance this Fusus system puts into place,” said Kincaid Dennett, a leader of the Lawrence Transparency Project. “People don’t like this. This needs to be placed onto the agenda.”
Commenters on Tuesday continued that call, asking commissioners to pause the program, at least until the public can weigh in fully.
“In a town where we get to weigh in on murals and speed bumps, we were denied the right to weigh in on a citywide surveillance system,” Christina McKenna said.
One person said the server maintenance and cooling of memory storage to hold all of the data that could be generated through the program could have an enormous impact on energy consumption in town.
The Lawrence Transparency Project delivered an open letter to the city commission Tuesday and more than two dozen people, many of whom signed the letter, spoke against the Fusus program. The letter includes signatures from a handful of local organizations, including Lawrence Tenants, Kansas Holistic Defenders, Douglas County Democrats and more.
Dennett said they have seen how items can move quickly on and off the agenda. But with the Fusus system, it wasn’t presented clearly to the community, they said.
According to records the Lawrence Transparency Project received through an open records request and shared with this publication, three city commissioners asked city staff for more information about the Fusus program after receiving a recent email alerting them to community concerns. Mayor Mike Dever said he was “curious about the issues mentioned.”
Multiple speakers said commissioners didn’t fully understand what they had approved in a consent agenda item (items that are generally considered routine and approved without discussion) in November and expressed frustration with the lack of public input.
“Y’all didn’t know what you approved,” Micha Ann Cox said. “We elected you to be the decision makers. We put our trust in you as a community, and you showed us that that trust was misguided.”
No commissioner spoke on the program before adjourning Tuesday’s meeting, but they typically do not respond to general public comment. Lawrence police Chief Rich Lockhart was present for public comment about Fusus.
See the full video of Tuesday’s general public comment at this link.
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Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.
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