Good evening. My name is [Name], and I live on [Street] here in Bridgewater.
I'm here to support Ordinance D-FY27-003 and to ask this committee to advance it as introduced.
I want to be clear about what this ordinance is not. It is not anti-police. It preserves manual plate checks, incident-specific investigations, and evidence lawfully obtained. Normal police work continues exactly as before.
What it ends is something different: the automatic, continuous recording of every vehicle that passes these cameras, converted into a searchable database of where our residents drive and when. One observation of my car means little. Thousands of observations, combined over time and across towns, build a detailed map of my life: where I worship, where my doctor is, whose driveway I park in.
And here is the part that concerns me most: Bridgewater doesn't control that data. It lives on a private company's platform. Who accesses it, how long it's kept, and where copies go are governed by vendor systems and contracts, not by this council and not by our community. Even if we delete our local records, we cannot be certain the copies are gone.
No one in this room voted for that. This ordinance simply says: before this technology becomes permanent by default, the Town should stop, disclose what exists, and decide deliberately. The 45-day report requirement puts everything on the public record.
Please move D-FY27-003 forward without weakening amendments. Thank you.