“Big Brother is watching you.” Although we are not to the point of a ‘Big Brother’ scenario George Orwell describes in 1984, we are getting increasingly closer to world like Orwell describes. Upon hearing about the $1,513,456 purchase of license plate readers, not including the cost of installation and power, I was astounded by the lengths this town is going to just monitor vehicles going in and out of Piedmont.

The purchasing of these license plate readers for such a substantial amount of money is not logical. There are 24 entrances to Piedmont. Only 10 to 12 of them would receive cameras. One issue with this is deciding which areas would receive cameras, and which would be let to fend for themselves. There is also the overlooking of the fact that if someone was to plan to commit a robbery or other crime, they might see a camera and just find another of the 12-14 entrances to go through.

It seems as though Piedmont is trying to unnecessarily isolate itself as much as possible from the surrounding town of Oakland. We are creating a virtual bubble, or wall, around our town because of fear from recent crimes. These cameras almost give a false sense of security. They only take photos of license plates and do not capture videos. This $1.5 million technology is to monitor stolen cars and who goes in and our of Piedmont. We cannot go spending this kind of money on something not worthwhile because of the increase in crime.

There is also the question as to what we would do with the information gathered from the license plate of a suspected car. By just having the license plate, we do not know who was driving the car and whether or not it was stolen. It would be hard to prove the crime in court with this evidence alone.

A better solution is to hire more cops to patrol the city 24/7. Having an actual person will be more much more affective than an expensive camera that has one job.

The purchase of the license plate reader cameras is an overreaction to a problem that could be more logically dealt with. Piedmont citizens moved to Piedmont well aware that we are the donut hole of the 13th most crime filled city in the United States. Unfortunately crime is going to happen, and we are lucky it doesn’t occur nearly as much as our neighbor city, however spending vast of money on a license plate reader will not help the problem.