Police love surveillance cameras, but not the cost. Setting up a high-definition system at a single site can cost thousands of dollars. So officials came up with a workaround in Richmond Heights, Ohio , east of Cleveland.
The city will soon make all banks, restaurants , hotels, and retail outlets within its jurisdiction install and maintain surveillance systems at the businesses’ own expense. A previous ordinance, passed in December 2021, does the same thing at apartment complexes.
Cameras must be government-approved and cover every entrance and parking lot 24/7. Property owners must also store the digital files for 30 days at their own expense. If anything breaks, they must pay for repairs or risk $500 daily fines. The city makes no exceptions for vandalism, power outages, or technical glitches.
The city even has a workaround to the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which controls search and seizure in the United States. The new ordinance , which will take effect on Sept. 26, requires property owners to hand over video files to the government upon demand. “If they don’t cooperate, we have to get a search warrant,” Richmond Heights Police Chief Calvin Williams told a local news station.
The ordinance says otherwise: “If a crime occurs, or if an employee believes a crime has occurred, the business shall contact the City’s Division of Police immediately, and the business shall provide immediate access.”
This means property owners must comply with or without a warrant, regardless of what Williams tells the media. Landlords concerned about privacy cannot opt out — even if they live in the building alongside their tenants. Neither can managers who want to give employees and customers a safe space free from police snooping.
Everyone affected by the ordinance will become a government stooge — like it or not.
Richmond Heights sees the arrangement as a double win. By giving itself control over what people do on their own land, the city eliminates access as a constraint on police surveillance. And by sticking business owners with the bill, the city eliminates cost as a constraint. Instead of “a chicken in every pot,” a 1920s campaign promise, the slogan 100 years later is: “A camera above every door.”
Many cities and counties share this goal.
Houston passed its own surveillance ordinance in 2022, although it is less expansive than the ones in Richmond Heights. It covers only bars, nightclubs, convenience stores, game rooms, and sexually oriented businesses.
Chatham, New Jersey, forces property owners to install surveillance cameras on new housing complexes and commercial buildings.
Milwaukee requires surveillance cameras inside convenience stores .
And Baltimore County, Maryland, requires cameras in many retail parking lots .
Laundromat owner Sung Cho fought back with a lawsuit in 2016 when New York police demanded warrantless access to his security footage. Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represented him and forced the city to back down.
We also persuaded DeKalb County, Georgia, to amend a 2023 ordinance that required gas stations to install security cameras and to give police warrantless access to the footage.
Other cases establish privacy rights more broadly. The Supreme Court held in 2013 that business owners and apartment complex residents have a right to be free from warrantless searches. And the Supreme Court held in 2018 that the police need a warrant for just one week’s worth of GPS data on a smartphone — much less than one month’s worth of data from a security system with multiple video feeds.
Despite this case history, policymakers keep looking for constitutional loopholes. But Richmond Heights still has time to reverse course. We sent a letter to the mayor and city council on April 8, 2024, calling for the repeal of the 2021 and 2024 ordinances.
Both violate the Constitution. If the government can compel citizens to conduct surveillance on their own land at their own expense — and then hand over the footage on demand — then law enforcement agencies would have broad new powers never before envisioned in the United States.
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Police presence would expand, forcing criminals to adjust. But the trade-offs would include the loss of privacy and property rights. Business owners would also lose economic liberty — the right to earn an honest living without unreasonable government interference.
These are steep prices nobody should have to pay.
Jared McClain is an attorney, and Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va.
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