Front Page
PUBLIC MOVES AGAINST FLOCK SURVEILLANCE
The Lake Geneva community, including towns, villages, and cities located around Geneva Lake, is becoming ever more critically negative about the use of private surveillance equipment to track and follow them in their private lives. Thirteen communities from around the state, for example, in nine counties, have banned the use of Flock license plate following, recording, and investigating revealed drivers from being used in their domains. These laws and ordinances are quite legal in every respect and only become complex in application when it comes to the tools, Flock being one of them, that the police departments use to track criminals and potential criminals.
No one seems to mind the tracking of criminals; it is the ‘potential’ measurements and conclusions that citizens are very concerned about. Of the so far discovered existence of nine Flock systems installed in and around Lake Geneva, it remains undetermined how many of the devices are used by the police (ownership of the devices and data also remain unknown at this time) and how many are in private hands.
The private Flock cameras do not get data from the police as to who the owner of the car is or who the vehicle might be registered to. The Geneva Shore Report is in search of that kind of data for the public’s benefit or at least to satisfy curiosity. At the common city council meeting on Monday night, the measure appearing on the agenda that came up to a vote was with respect to a member of the city council of the city being selected to be on the police and fire commission. That member would be a non-voting member but would be allowed into all closed sessions or confidential discussions.
In a move against surveillance of the police and fire departments (the commission allows the police and fire department to be independent of management or authority of the city of Lake Geneva leadership), the council voted to deny itself the right to have one of its members serve as a member of that commission. Unusual result, as it appears to the editorial staff of the GSR. The question that keeps coming up in front of the leadership of different parts of Lake Geneva is the same as what has been coming up in front of the school board.
The question is one of trust. Are the taxpaying residents of the city placing trust in the right or the wrong people to handle their money…and it’s all their money? David, administrator of the city, and Peter, superintendent of the two school districts, are in unique leadership positions, although David has more power, so he’s able to remain buried deep under the covers while subordinates analyze, interpret, and express themselves on his behalf. Peter Wilson, on the other hand, is in Todd Krause’s situation, where he does not have real direct power over very much at all. The first result of Speedo’s FOIA request for records primarily directed at revealing the existence, the amounts, and the identities of those receiving the stipends disbursed by the district is in. The superintendent’s salary data is in the responding packet. The former superintendent’s salary is also there in the paperwork.
What is not there? Anything at all about stipends or anyone who might have received one…or more. This behavior, on the part of the school districts, is what has become kind of a new ‘normal’ for political and accounting response replies. Is Speedo done now? Not on your life, and neither is the GSR in pursuit of something that it does not really know exists. In other words. This kind of searching and reporting is at the very foundation of why the GSR is becoming and likely remaining the only newspaper reporting on what really goes on ‘under the covers’ around Geneva Lake.
