Albany County's new SafeCam program is facing questions over its legality.
This month Albany County Legislators unanimously approved a measure to establish the Albany County SafeCam Program. SafeCam allows authorities access to footage recorded by private security systems for use in crime-solving.
Albany County Legislator Sam Fein, a Democrat from the 6th district, co-sponsored the measure.
“The program is voluntary, I want to stress, and it's gonna make a difference and help make our community safer, especially at a time when we're seeing a lot of a lot of crime, especially gun violence, impacting a lot of people,” said Fein.
Adriel Colón-Casiano, an attorney in private practice, believes the impact the SafeCam program will have is twice as worrisome.
“The law, what it does, is it creates a database," Colón-Casiano said. "And that itself doesn't sound too innocuous. But really, the question should be what is this database doing that the sheriff's office can't already do? And that is secure private security camera footage of people walking around in their homes in Albany. So this is a necessary step to peer into people's private lives and one that I really genuinely am concerned over.”
On a social media post Colón-Casiano says the database "will most assuredly be made public."
“If you look at the bill, it's three lines, it can fit on a business card. So it doesn't really matter what the intentions are, what matters is how the law looks at pieces of legislation or public documents," said Colón-Casiano. "The database itself doesn't have any privacy protections built into it. So that means that the database would be a public document that's FOILable. “
Colón-Casiano also sees the SafeCam program as "anti-tenant" – claiming it empowers landlords to use the powers of the sheriff's department to evict residents and also could be used as a tool to track the movements of local community activists.
“What this database does is it can create, essentially, a map of all the cameras in the city so that they can use it to follow a protester back to their home, or to get additional information from them, because they can track the protests from one location to another throughout the city," said Colón-Casiano. "And they don't have to send the cop car to every single door and ask if they have security camera. So it's pretty concerning for people who want to exercise their First Amendment in the city of Albany.”
Fein rejects that.
“I don't see how that's the case. Because this is this is about exterior public facing cameras, the law actually has the word exterior in it," Fein said. "And, currently if a landlord were to put a camera in their home, they could, they could do that, I guess, and use that in an eviction process. Bu having this database wouldn't change that or not, this would really strike me as a, you know, something that the landlord may bring up in housing court.”
Sheriff Craig Apple says his staff will help create the SafeCam database, and points out that it is a voluntary program that expects in time will become "another tool in the toolbox."
"This would be if a crime occurred, we would check our database, see if there was any private footage in the area, go and retrieve a copy," Apple said. "If they don't want to give us a copy, they don't give us a copy. It's very simple process. So I understand some people are just against, you know, government and against law enforcement. But again, when something happens, we'll still go and keep them safe."
Colón-Casiano thinks the initial legal challenge to SafeCam will likely occur the first time video footage is introduced as evidence in a courtroom. He believes the legislation will eventually be found unconstitutional and he hopes the county will seek an alternative to the program.
Requests for comment to the Capital Region Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union and Albany County Attorney Eugenia Condon were not returned in time for broadcast. A spokesperson for the legislature declined to be recorded but defended the SafeCam initiative, saying "if you Google it you'll find it going on all over the country."
