When I first learned that a company called Flock Safety was putting up surveillance cameras on telephone poles I thought it might have something to do with geese. Up in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, there’s an outfit capturing sharks, putting tags on their fins and tracking wherever the sharks might swim.

Turns out I was wrong. The cameras are not aimed up. They are aimed down and they keep an eye on the comings and goings of the local citizens by memorizing the license plate numbers on their cars as they travel about.

Some good has come of this. Six robbers up to no good parked their van on Newtown Lane in front of the East Hampton Village Balenciaga pocketbook store four years ago, and five of them went into the store and sent the single clerk there down into the basement stock room looking for a particular pocketbook not on the shelves and while he was gone, the five quickly cleaned the shelves of 34 pocketbooks valued at about $69,000, ran out with them, hopped in the van with the other guy at the wheel and sped off to where they came from which was Newark, New Jersey. In-store surveillance cameras captured the robbery.

A passerby, seeing them run out of the store, called 911. The flock cameras were reviewed. And within an hour, the van was pulled over to the side of the road in Manorville where all were put under arrest and taken to jail.

More recently, on Main Street at 3 a.m. in the morning, a woman got out of a Toyota parked in front of the Ralph Lauren Store, bashed in the door, entered and came back out with about $21,250 worth of expensive garments. The police used drones to track her to a Newtown Lane apartment, where she was arrested..

But there is a big downside to all of this. Since Flock sells these cameras all over the country, there have been numerous occasions where the police have trampled the Fourth Amendment guaranteeing the right of privacy to all citizens. One cannot burst into somebody’s home unannounced without permission. One needs to get a warrant issued by a judge to make an exception where a crime is being committed, or where a criminal is holed up hoping nobody would notice.