Kathy Cohen
Role at the time: Independent candidate for Roanoke City Council and chair of the Roanoke Gun Violence Prevention Commission
Condemned
Statement summary
Kathy Cohen said that after investigating the cameras she concluded no city should have them, and that she would like to see them removed because she does not think they increase public safety.
“I took a lot of time to investigate them and I came to the conclusion that no city should have these cameras. We are simply not ready for them. We do not have laws for them. We are a society that is moving towards surveillance, Ring cameras, Blink cameras, everything else. And we need to figure out as a society how we're going to handle that. But I would like to see these cameras removed. I don't think that they increase public safety.”
Open source (opens in a new tab)Melrose Mixer: Nine Council Candidates Spar Over Schools, Flock Tech, and Housing ReformCandidate answers in the Flock Cameras and Surveillance section of the article
Why we used this label
The reference point is whether networked license-plate reader systems such as Flock should exist and be used. Cohen said she concluded no city should have these cameras and that she would like to see them removed from Roanoke. That is a call to remove the cameras, so Condemned fits, even though she also described society's wider questions about surveillance.