A Kansas city networked by security cameras: Big win? Or Big Brother?

A city proposal in the university town of Lawrence aims to deliver hundreds of video feeds — from both public and private security cameras — to the Lawrence Police Department. (Eric Thomas illustration for Kansas Reflector)

I wrote down this quotation in a notebook more than a decade ago: “Legal issues are the collision of right answers.”

Dan Weddle, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said it during a legal conference, and it struck me as both sage and fair-minded.

The sentiment is so durable that you can substitute all kinds of phrases at the start of the sentence:

“Political questions are the collision of right answers.”

“Workplaces are the collision of right answers.”

“Disagreements between spouses are the collision of right answers.”

And this week, “The controversy about Lawrence police using private cameras is a collision of right answers.”

A city proposal in the university town aims to deliver hundreds of video feeds — from both public and private security cameras — to the Lawrence Police Department. Staff and officers could use the program to inform officers about the circumstance of calls they are responding to and also serve as evidence.

Language in the proposal would restrict police access to cameras at businesses and organizations: no live surveillance using cameras at private residences. The police department could not patch into your neighbor’s Ring doorbell in real time to watch Fido pooping in the front yard. Or, to watch you sipping a margarita on Friday afternoon.

Instead, Lawrence residents can notify police that they have a residential camera, allowing the department to contact them if there was an incident in their area. Police would then provide a way for residents to contribute video files of relevant situations using a weblink.

As documented by the Lawrence Times and Lawrence Journal-World, some community members are asking the city commission to tap the brakes before adopting this new security program.

After reading the news coverage, reviewing the municipal websites and looking through some of the public documents, I place debate about the security program in a complicated place: at “the collision of right answers.” Community members have legitimate arguments for pausing while the police present compelling reasons for moving forward.

On the public relations side, it’s never good when your public explanation of a policing program includes this quote: “The goal of both programs is not mass surveillance.”

Yikes.

If you (in this case, Sgt. Drew Fennelly of the Lawrence Police Department) are explaining to the famously liberal folks in a college town that you won’t be watching them all of the time from everywhere, you are definitely on the back foot.

He continued: “The department lacks the personnel to monitor even its own cameras continuously, let alone privately owned ones. Instead, the aim is to improve the speed and efficiency of investigations and to enhance officer safety by providing critical situational awareness as officers respond to a scene. … Both city-owned and private cameras are accessed only in response to a specific call for service.”

In other words, police won’t watch over your shoulders because we don’t have the manpower. More reassuring might be: “We know that snooping on you from your neighbor’s Ring doorbell is creepy, invasive and uncomfortable. That’s why we aren’t.”

Also, the partnership with technology vendor Axon feels shadowy, if not predatory.

First, using a private company to receive, store and analyze video footage from across town appears to begin a new public-private partnership. In this case, the private half is Axon, a corporation with a value near $60 billion that is best known under its former name, Taser. Yep, the company created the famous shocking police device.

Regardless of the character of the corporation, public-private partnerships like this one inevitably create gray areas. Who has responsibility for how the program runs? If Lawrence isn’t happy with how the program is running, can the city tinker with it? Or is Fusus, the software sold by Axon, a one-size-fits-all product?

With the company promising the use of artificial intelligence to analyze footage, it’s reasonable to worry about how that powerful technology would be deployed by a private company.

The website associated with the program, www.connectlawrence.org, immediately blurs that line. You might think the city of Lawrence runs the website, with the police badge at the top of the page, plus the department’s contact information in the footer. Not so fast.

The website is copyrighted to Axon Enterprise, and the pages’ source code points to the company’s web resources.

The biggest tell of who operates this public-private website? The homepage connects to “Shop Now” bundles that include cameras and yearly subscriptions to Axon technology. The bundles start with a $350 device that will connect four cameras to the Fusus system for a year. At the high end, there’s a $7,300 bundle pushing video feeds for up to 180 cameras to the police department for a year.

If the prices sound steep, you should see the climb in Axon’s stock price over the past five years. The company has flourished in selling gear and technology to police departments, with its stock price rising more than 800% in the past five years.

In fact, profits are so healthy that the company’s CEO has been listed as one of the best compensated in the United States. When the New York Times listed the top executives in 2024, using “traditional accounting,” Axon CEO Patrick W. Smith earned $164.5 million.

Using another accounting metric — compensation actually paid — Smith earned $385 million. That compensation number is 10 times larger than the 2025 annual budget for the entire Lawrence Police Department.

Watching a corporation and its CEO derive so much wealth from municipalities such as Lawrence, Overland Park and Wichita makes you wonder if taxpayers are overpaying.

Or, more precisely, they are being oversold — buying a suite of bundled products that the police department wants, rather than what they need.

Lawrence residents who have resisted the program also raise privacy concerns. Even with residential cameras restricted from surveillance use, Lawrence-based organizer Kincaid Dennett worries that cameras operated by businesses and organizations might record footage of nearby residences. After all, a camera’s vision is not restricted by property lines.

With all that said, there’s a compelling case to be made for the camera program. First, as described to the Lawrence Journal-World, video footage was recently instrumental in finding, prosecuting and convicting the shooter in a Lawrence murder.

Also, if cameras are positioned thoughtfully, they can only record situations in public areas. In doing so, they would have the same constitutional access to public areas that photojournalists like me rely on. If I can have my cameras and lenses on Main Street, then why not the police?

In San Jose, California, local retailers were optimistic last year about installing Fusus. Thefts jeopardized some businesses, owners said.

“That’s what I would call cheap insurance — in terms of ensuring that I can get a very detailed response to an incident that could be occurring at my business,” one shop owner said.

Finally, a registry of residential cameras feels much more restrained than the “1984” styled fears of Big Brother watching from every front porch every day. Having a system for finding residents who have footage steps back comfortably from the specter of cameras everywhere.

Because Axon technology is so widely used, Lawrence has company in wrestling with this balance, as many other towns have debated whether or not to implement the Fusus program: Clermont, Florida; Pell City, Alabama; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina.

Here in Kansas, the city of Lawrence must decide what to do when two right answers collide: pause or proceed?

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.