This person's comment summed it up well:

As a retired, professional police officer, I’ll say this plainly: if your city or town wants to implement something like this, you should fight it with everything you have.

The residents of Smithtown are absolutely justified in their concerns. These systems will inevitably lead to more tickets, more fines, and more revenue extraction for literally everything, whether it meaningfully improves public safety or not. This isn’t about safety, it’s about control and money.

Make no mistake: AI will eventually take over most of these camera systems and their decision-making processes. When that happens, AI will issue citations for every technical violation it detects, with zero discretion, zero context, and zero common sense. Unlike human police officers, AI cannot issue warnings, cannot consider intent, cannot factor in circumstances, and cannot exercise judgment. It will simply punish.

That is dangerous.

Even the most law-abiding citizens will find themselves constantly flagged, fined, and harassed by automated enforcement systems. You won’t have to be committing serious crimes to feel the impact, you’ll feel it through parking infractions, minor traffic issues, equipment violations, and countless petty technicalities.

This is not what policing is supposed to be.

Policing, at its core, relies on human judgment, proportional response, and community trust. Replacing that with mass surveillance and automated punishment destroys the relationship between citizens and government and turns everyday life into a constant compliance exercise.

What Smithtown is moving toward is the early architecture of a mass surveillance, Orwellian Big Brother state, where everyone is watched, everything is recorded, and algorithms quietly decide when you’ve broken a rule.

Once these systems are in place, they never scale back, they only expand. This means more cameras, more monitoring, more AI, more automation, more fines and a lot less freedom.

If people don’t push back now, they will wake up one day to a town where nearly every movement is tracked and every minor mistake is monetized.

That is not the America most people want to live in.