At the start of last night’s public hearing at City Hall about a proposal to return the controversial spy plane to Baltimore’s skies, Councilman Brandon Scott made it clear he and his colleagues wield little power, ultimately, over allowing the Baltimore Police Department and Persistent Surveillance Systems to collaborate again.
“All of us here, we can’t have a choice,” said the Public Safety Committee chairman, addressing the mayor’s chief of government relations, Karen Stokes, and offering a reminder that the police department remains under state control. “We can’t say that the council should have any authority over it.”
Nevertheless, he and his colleagues did seize the hearing as a chance to share their own worries about a privately funded plane surveilling the city, linking up with police via CitiWatch cameras to help them catch criminals and sharing data between private and public entities in the process.
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