Police are installing license plate reader cameras that record plate numbers of passing vehicles at six locations in Hancock County.
Bucksport is set to be one of the latest areas in the county joining a local network of police agencies that use such cameras, which are already online in Bar Harbor and Ellsworth.
The new installations represent a growing use by police of public monitoring technology in Maine, which law enforcement describes as a way to promote public safety. Some residents have said such cameras infringe on civil rights, while others feel they have a negligible effect in a time when individuals’ data is already commonly recorded and shared.
In particular, monitoring cameras such as those made by Flock and Verkada have been controversial elsewhere in Maine because of concerns that they might be used to track people without cause, and that federal immigration officials may have access to the information they collect.
The Hancock County project uses different reader cameras, from Motorola Solutions, that record license plate numbers; local law enforcement says its policies will prevent the information from being used for immigration enforcement.
Bucksport is the only location for the new readers that has been made public. The town’s traffic light was chosen as one site, and law enforcement asked the town council in December for support of an application to the state, which owns it, to attach the hardware.
They received that support after some discussion about whether information the reader cameras collect could be shared with federal immigration officials.
Resident Don White questioned that possibility at that meeting. He told the Bangor Daily News on Thursday that he’s not confident restrictions on access to the information couldn’t be overridden by other agencies for surveillance purposes, particularly in light of what he views as more regular surveillance and government overreach.
“In normal times, I wouldn’t be thinking so much about it,” he said. “But I don’t see these as normal times.”
David Weeda, another resident, has stood across the street from the Bucksport traffic light every Saturday for five and a half years at the Solidarity Bucksport demonstrations he organizes.
He wasn’t sure about the license plate reader proposal at first, but knowing that they only record plate numbers and information won’t be shared with ICE, he isn’t worried. The information the cameras collect may even make demonstrators safer, according to Weeda.
“I’m all for good policing, that being that which protects the public,” he said.
The readers have been used for parking enforcement in Bar Harbor since 2019 without any requests for information from ICE, according to David Kerns, the town’s police chief.
“It’s really a tool for law enforcement to make sure we’re doing all we can, just because we can’t be everywhere all at once,” he said, describing it as an investigative resource rather than an effort to track or surveil residents.
The countywide project has been in progress for about three years, before the immigration enforcement surge in Maine last month and increased enforcement during the second Trump administration.
Bar Harbor’s experience with the cameras and restrictions on their use was a litmus test for how a larger program would work across Hancock County, according to Kerns. Ellsworth also started using plate reader cameras within the last year, he said in December.
The project is funded by Department of Homeland Security grant money that flows to the county level and is then distributed to specific projects. The reader cameras were identified by chiefs in Hancock and Washington counties as an option that could benefit them both, Kerns said in December, though the new cameras are only located in Hancock County. He represents police chiefs in the two counties.
Neighboring Washington County has seen more illegal drug trafficking and violent crime in the last decade by out-of-state criminal gangs that have set up shop in Maine. In the past few years, people accused in separate murders out of state — Travis Blake and Danielle Kelsen — have also been apprehended on Mount Desert Island after police learned they had traveled to Maine.
Each reader location in the new program will have at least two cameras to cover different lanes and directions of travel, with 13 in total across the six sites in Hancock County. The information they collect is searchable only by plate number with an active case number. Under state law, it can be kept for 21 days.
Kerns declined to say where the other cameras would be located, stating that publicizing them would make the cameras easy to avoid.
To access plate information, agencies would need to request it with a case number for an ongoing criminal investigation. The system also runs a “hot list” of plates including those of stolen vehicles or wanted people, alerting law enforcement when one passes.
An ICE request would need to be tied to a criminal investigation, not just immigration enforcement, to be approved, according to Kerns.
The use of the system is governed by a memorandum of understanding that all the law enforcement executives in the county signed, he said, along with state law and “strict access controls.”
In Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, police follow a 2017 resolve by local voters to limit the relationship between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement. The two towns declared themselves sanctuary communities in nonbinding resolutions that year.
That included “fair and impartial policing and the protection of the constitutional rights of all individuals,” Kerns said, and the same principles will guide the use of plate reader cameras in the county.
In Bucksport, Councilor Tracey Hair said in December that she had also primarily heard concerns about whether the cameras could be used for immigration enforcement.
Kerns stressed that criminal law enforcement in Maine is “totally separate” from, and doesn’t take part in, immigration actions.
Steve Bishop, now a former town councilor in Bucksport, raised an unsolved hit-and-run in the town from September 2024, when a car hit a woman in a downtown crosswalk and kept driving. The license plate wasn’t clear in footage from existing cameras, which is the reason the driver hasn’t been identified, according to the town’s public safety director, Sean Geagan.
Elsewhere, cameras in nearby Brewer were recently used to intercept a man with a history of domestic violence before he could return to where a victim was staying, Kerns said.
Other municipalities, largely in southern Maine, have drawn scrutiny for installing reader cameras, particularly those sold by the competing company Flock.
That company has shared information it collects with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and is developing a tool to track individuals even without a warrant or court order. It creates a database of passing vehicles that can be searched whether or not drivers are suspected of criminal activity, the Portland Press Herald reported last year.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine in December called the use of these reader cameras “dragnet surveillance” that significantly threatens constitutional rights to privacy, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and freedom of speech and association.
That’s especially a threat when that data is shared with the federal government and other states, the group said. It has filed records requests in 12 municipalities from York to Lewiston that it believes are working with Flock.
Hancock County’s chiefs chose Motorola cameras to integrate with record management software they already use from another company owned by Motorola, according to Kerns.
The brand hasn’t met with the same history of public outcry as Flock, though one municipality in Illinois gave ICE access to its data through “human error,” local media reported in September. The company’s webpage for the camera model used in Hancock County also notes it can also identify the make and model of vehicles using AI.
Vigilant Solutions, a subsidiary of Motorola, maintains a nationwide database of plate information that ICE has had access to for years, The Guardian reported last year.
Hancock County officials can control where plate information goes and will not share it with the company for that national database, according to Kerns.
“Our department will continue to prioritize public safety, safeguard individual rights, and ensure that any use or disclosure of LPR data complies with law, policy, and departmental oversight,” he said.
Weeda, the Bucksport activist, recalled numerous times on the bridge when demonstrators wanted to call the police because of intimidation or illegal behavior from passers-by, but didn’t have enough information recorded to pursue a report. He’s hopeful the cameras will help with that.
As it is, after being lifted off the ground and threatened during one demonstration, he tries to stand in view of an existing video camera on the traffic light.
Weeda added that he already feels surveilled wherever he goes.
“We’re not alone when we walk through this culture anymore,” he said.