Cape Coral police now put the number of licence plate reader cameras cut down at one intersection at four, twice the number first reported

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 1, 2026

Photo: Atypeek Dgn / Pexels

What it changes

The number changed, and that is the whole reason to come back to this. When this site reported the damage on Thursday evening the count was two, and that count came from Adam Gahrmann, the resident who drove past, found the cameras on the ground and filmed them. It was never a police figure and was not presented as one. Cape Coral police have now put the number at four. Doubling is not a rounding difference, and it moves the incident out of the category of a passing act of damage at one corner and into something that took sustained effort at a single intersection. What has not changed is that the department has published nothing at all of its own. Its newsroom carries releases for street racing arrests and for the school zone camera programme, both from earlier in the same week, and nothing on this. Four days on, everything the public knows about damage to the city's own surveillance equipment has come through one television newsroom rather than from the agency that owns the cameras. That gap is worth naming, because this department has been asked about this network before and has already said it does not disclose how many licence plate readers it operates or where they are. A resident cannot check the four against a published total, because no published total exists. The second addition is a technical one that narrows what was actually lost, and it cuts against the intuition. Ray Leventhal, a cybersecurity expert with CPR Tools, told the outlet that these cameras hold very little on board and that what they capture goes almost immediately to a central database, so cutting a pole down does not erase what has already been sent. His qualification is the part that matters: anything captured in the moments before the camera went offline may never have been transmitted, and that is the window where evidence could be missing. Flock Safety, in a statement to the same newsroom, made the forward-looking version of the same argument, saying a time-sensitive alert tied to an Amber Alert, a missing person case or a violent crime suspect on the move may never reach the officers who need it. Both of those are statements of what could happen rather than accounts of anything that did. No investigation has been reported as harmed, no case has been named, and neither the company nor the department has said that any specific lead was lost. The honest summary after four days is that four cameras are down instead of two, how they came down is still not established by any authority, nobody has been arrested or named, and the city has yet to say a word about it in its own voice.

Cape Coral police say four automated licence plate reader cameras were damaged at the intersection of Diplomat Parkway East and Santa Barbara Boulevard, Gulf Coast News reported on Friday.

That is twice the number recorded when the damage was first reported on Thursday. The earlier count of two came from Adam Gahrmann, the resident who found the cameras on the ground and filmed them, rather than from the department.

Police are looking for the person responsible. No arrest, charge, suspect or incident report number has been made public, and no authority has stated what caused the damage.

Ray Leventhal, a cybersecurity expert with CPR Tools, told the outlet that the way the poles had been severed looked to him like the work of a saw. He said that was his opinion.

Leventhal also described what a downed camera does and does not cost an investigation. The cameras carry little storage of their own, he said, and what they record moves almost at once to a central database, so images already transmitted are not lost with the hardware. The exposure sits in the gap: if a camera went offline before its last images were sent, he said, that would interrupt any investigation those images were relevant to.

Flock Safety sent Gulf Coast News a statement making a similar point about future alerts. "A time-sensitive alert tied to an Amber Alert, a missing-person case, or a violent crime suspect on the move may never reach the officers who need it," the company said. It said it works directly with law enforcement to investigate damaged or stolen cameras.

Neither the company nor the department has said that any particular case or lead was affected.

The Cape Coral Police Department has published nothing about the incident on its own newsroom. Its most recent releases, from July 28 and July 29, concern a street racing operation and the return of school zone speed cameras. In answers published in July the department said it does not disclose the number or locations of its licence plate readers.

The report was published by Gulf Coast News on July 31 and the reporting is Madison Zaleski's.

Where we read it: Madison Zaleski at Gulf Coast News. Read their story.

The document: No public filing has been released.

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