Lawsuit to challenge Winter Park surveillance

A local Libertarian leader is planning to sue Winter Park in his pursuit to rid the community of what he believes to be two of the greatest threats to civil liberties in the country: red-light and surveillance cameras.

David Leavitt said he believes the devices violate the rights of the American people, filming them constantly without their consent and, he contends, by fining them for traffic violations without due process.

“They don’t consider that they’re giving up their liberties,” Leavitt said. “I don’t think they think about it that much.”

The Longwood resident’s own outrage over the state of liberty in local and U.S. governments, compounded with the increasing presence of the cameras, led Leavitt to form the Libertarian Party of Seminole County last May, he said.

The Libertarian Party of Seminole County, he said, plans to file a lawsuit against the city of Winter Park for failing to provide the specific locations of surveillance cameras planted throughout the city, including up and down Park Avenue.

Leavitt said he requested the information last month, but was turned down and referred to Florida Statutes 281.301, 119.07 (3) (a) and 119.07 (2) (d), which states “information relating to security systems” is “confidential and exempt.”

But Orlando attorney Jacob Stuart, representing the Libertarian Party of Seminole County in the lawsuit, claimed the statute to be non-applicable.

“We believe that statute isn’t applicable because we’re not seeking to actually have copies of what they’re recording,” Stuart said. “We’re simply seeking to know the location of those so that citizens can be on notice.”

Stuart said that even if the statute was applicable, it’s still unconstitutional. Recording people on a consistent basis in a public area without their knowledge or proper notice is in violation of the due process right in the Constitution, he said.

At the state level in Tallahassee, efforts to stop cities from installing red-light cameras continue. A bill filed by Florida House Rep. Frank Artiles (R-Miami), which would ban the cameras moving forward after July 1, moved its way through the pipeline Jan. 9 as it was approved by a vote of 10-3 by the House’s Transportation and Highway Safety Subcommittee.

Retired Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Paul Henry launched additional local opposition to the cameras last year after he released research showing that intersections with red-light cameras in Winter Park rarely see crashes related to red-light running to begin with.

Henry pulled statistics from the Department of Transportation and found that between 2005 and 2011, three out of six intersections in Winter Park had only one red-light violation crash in the entire seven-year period.

Henry said that from 1994 to 2010, the Department of Transportation released a summary of all the crashes in Florida for that year called Traffic Crash Facts, which included when, where and why each crash took place.

But in 2011, the reports no longer listed the causes of each crash, he said. Florida had begun widely using the red-light cameras during the previous year.

“The bottom line is that not only do they not reduce these crashes, theses cities and the state are going out of their way to hide this data, to not release it,” Henry said.

“I’ve never gotten a concrete answer as to why they won’t publish this data.”

Leavitt knows there’s still plenty of work to be done to preserve the civil liberties of residents, never forgetting the importance of the document that outlines their rights.

“I think the Constitution is the basis of what we need to go by to keep us strong as a country,” Leavitt said.

“It’s our guiding light. It still is.”

Stuart said the lawsuit against the city of Winter Park should be filed within the next two weeks.