09/03/2026
Your city is generating surveillance data every single day.
Do you know where it goes?
Not in theory. Not according to the vendor contract you signed two years ago. Right now, today, in real time, when a camera on a public road captures a license plate or a face or a vehicle moving through your downtown corridor, where does that data go, who can query it, and under what conditions can an outside agency access it without your knowledge or your approval?
These are not hypothetical questions. Dozens of American cities have discovered in the last eighteen months that the answers to those questions were not what they assumed. Cameras installed for local public safety were feeding into national data sharing networks. Outside agencies were running queries on local infrastructure without local authorization. Data retention policies written into vendor contracts contained language that gave the vendor discretion over disclosure that city leadership never fully understood when they signed.
The cities that avoided those conversations did not have better lawyers. They had better vendor decisions.
Physical security infrastructure that your agency fully controls, with data that belongs entirely to your jurisdiction and access that you authorize, is not a premium. It is the baseline standard for responsible public safety governance.
Critical Edge builds surveillance and access control systems for municipal clients where the data, the access, and the accountability all belong to the institution that commissioned the work.
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