The North Smithfield town administrator, who also serves as the town's public safety director, told residents Monday that he personally approved a Rhode Island State Police request to install automated license plate reader cameras in town, and that he did so through an email exchange with the police chief without any vote or notice to the Town Council.
The admission came during the council's August 3 meeting, according to the North Smithfield Town Council's published meeting recording. Two of the cameras are now in place in North Smithfield, both on Route 146 — one facing north and one facing south — the administrator said.
Automated license plate readers, often shortened to ALPR, are cameras that photograph passing vehicles, convert the plate numbers into searchable text, and store the results in a database that police can query. The core dispute Monday was not whether the technology works, but who in North Smithfield has the authority to say yes to it, and whether residents were told.
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The subject reached the floor during open forum, after a resident asked the council to reject any ALPR technology inside town limits. The resident said news reports had disclosed that someone in town government had already approved a state police request, and described the process as done "behind closed doors, lacking transparency, under secrecy, with zero public discussion and absolutely no input from this council."
A council member then asked directly who had made that determination. After the chair tried to defer the question to the agenda item scheduled later in the meeting, the administrator answered.
"I allowed it, and I didn't know," he said, adding that the chief of police contacted him in November of last year to say the state police had approached the department about deploying the cameras statewide. According to the administrator, the chief asked whether he had a problem with it, and he answered, "Generally, no."
He said his view has since changed. "I do have a serious problem with Flock cameras as they have evolved," he said, using the brand name of the camera vendor. He also said the two cameras on Route 146 are the only ones the state police "will ever deploy in this town again."
A resident objected that the administrator lacked the standing to make that call at all. "You do not make the decisions of the towns. You're the day-to-day operator. They make the decisions for the town," the resident said.
The administrator's response drew the line he has since defended: "I am the public safety director. This is a public safety issue. It's not a public policy issue." He added that when the chief contacted him, "I thought it was more of a general inquiry."
The records question
A second thread ran alongside the authority dispute: whether the town's own records back up the account.
During the exchange, a resident asked why an Access to Public Records Act request filed the previous day had come back saying there were no conversations about ALPRs in town. APRA is Rhode Island's public records law, which requires municipalities to produce non-exempt government records on request.
Returning to the point later in the meeting, the same resident said the request had been answered that day with no documents at all. "However, as of today, there are no documents for anything regarding your APRA request," the resident said. "So again, are we hiding it?"
When another speaker suggested the administrator had described only a conversation, the resident pushed back: "If we play back the meeting, he actually said it was via email." The administrator said afterward that he had spoken with the chief that day and that the chief planned to file the full response to the records request the following day, noting the chief was not in at the time.
The recording does not resolve whether the email the administrator described exists in the town's records, and no document was produced at the meeting.
What the council did — and did not — do
Two council members placed a discussion item on the agenda. One of them explained that the item grew out of a social media argument that appeared likely to bring a crowd to open forum, and said the intent was to give people an organized place to be heard rather than to force a position.
"I wasn't looking to make a vote that the town vote and take a position on this," the council member said.
The council voted by roll call to open the agenda item to public comment, and later voted by roll call to close it. No vote was taken on the cameras themselves. No resolution was adopted, and no ordinance was introduced.
That distinction matters. Members discussed, but did not act on, the resident's request that the council formally reject the state police deployment and demand removal of the two installed cameras. The administrator told the council that reversal is unlikely to work in practice, saying another Rhode Island community reversed its position and asked the state police to withdraw the cameras, and the state police declined. He said 37 of the state's 39 communities have approved the deployment.
The budget question
A council member used the discussion to revisit a line item, saying the police department had requested $125,000 for license plate readers during budget season, and that the request was not approved by the administration, the budget committee or the council. The council member asked whether that money was for the same brand of camera.
The administrator said he did not know, but that he had told the chief he does not support the department purchasing the cameras. Another member said they recalled the request being for equipment mounted on patrol cars, which reads plates of vehicles in front of the cruiser, rather than fixed roadside cameras. The recording does not establish what the $125,000 request would have bought.
The privacy-versus-enforcement split
Council members did not speak with one voice.
One member argued the technology's value is concrete, citing a friend whose daughter was killed in a road rage incident and saying the cameras allowed police to track down and arrest the driver. The same member argued that police already have tools open to abuse, including the ability to run plates and background checks, and that the answer is legal accountability rather than prohibition. "Technology can always be abused," the member said. "What's important is that we have laws that keep up with the technology — not deny the technology, but keep up with the technology."
Another voice on the dais landed in the middle, saying the trade-off is genuinely hard: "You know, we all want safety, but we also want privacy. There's always a trade-off between the two."
Two residents took the other side. One catalogued what he described as a documented record of misconduct involving the North Smithfield Police Department, including a federal court ruling on the department's practice of withholding seized property, an internal matter involving an officer, and a settled lawsuit brought by dispatchers alleging a hostile work environment. His argument was that a database is only as safe as the agency holding it. "Unregulated surveillance tools require absolute transparency with flawless integrity," he said.
A second resident, who said he founded a local group focused on government overreach, asked the council to ban all mass surveillance technology in town, including on private property. He said polling found 90 percent of town residents support a full ban; the recording contains no detail on who conducted that polling or how.
Unanswered questions and next steps
Before public comment closed, a resident asked the council to put four questions to the administrator: the length of the state police contract with the camera vendor, who besides the state police can access the database, how long records are retained, and what capabilities the installed cameras have that are currently switched off. A council member asked the resident to send the questions in writing. None were answered at the meeting.
The administrator said he plans to send written communication to the Rhode Island State Police through the chief, stating that no further state police cameras may be installed in North Smithfield without formal written notice to the town. He also questioned aloud whether the state police needed municipal sign-off in the first place, since Route 146 is a state highway, suggesting the outreach to 39 cities and towns may have been a courtesy.
"There's got to be an official process," he said, "and it can't be just an email to the chief who sends an email to the administrator saying, 'Hey, what do you think?'"
A council member asked that any future request to install cameras be brought to the full council for discussion. Members also noted that a binding ban would require an ordinance, which under town practice requires a public hearing and two readings before a vote — a process that could not be completed before the November election.
Residents who want the council to act formally would need to press for an ordinance to be drafted and advertised. The council's next regular meeting is the venue for that request; the meeting recording and agendas are posted by the town.