A St. Petersburg Police vehicle at the municipal marina in St. Petersburg, Florida on March 28, 2026. Credit: Del Harper / Shutterstock
Crime is a serious problem, and our public officials have reminded us of an important principle: if a surveillance tool helps solve crimes, and you are not committing crimes, what exactly do you have to worry about? So I would like to offer a modest proposal.
Let us begin by requiring every resident of St. Petersburg to submit their fingerprints and a DNA sample to the police department to create a searchable database.
Of course, fingerprints and DNA only tell us where you’ve been. To prevent crime, we should probably know where you’re going. Therefore, I propose police checkpoints at major intersections throughout St. Petersburg. Officers can randomly stop residents, inspect their vehicles, ask where they are going, and search anything that looks suspicious. Public safety is clearly worth the inconvenience.
We should also require every resident to install the Safe St. Pete App™ on their phone. The app would give law enforcement access to your text messages, emails, photographs, location history, contacts, and internet searches.
Naturally, criminals may leave their phones at home, so every home should also contain a city-issued microphone connected to the police department. Alexa has already demonstrated the technology. Police wouldn’t listen all the time, obviously. Only when necessary. And recordings would only be saved for a month.
We could also require:
Every resident to submit a facial scan.
Every vehicle to contain a government GPS tracker.
Every financial transaction to be screened.
Every resident to report overnight guests.
Every child to receive an implanted tracking device at birth.
And perhaps once a year we could all report to Tropicana Field (assuming something hasn’t been built there yet) to make declarations of innocence.
Imagine the crimes we could solve! And imagine how safe we would be.
The Fourth Amendment was obviously written because the founders opposed solving crimes.
As Chief Holloway and Mayor Welch keep telling us: privacy is clearly an admission of guilt. Requiring the government to obtain individualized justification before searching people (as the law requires) is being “soft on crime.” And “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about” is the argument every surveillance state eventually makes. Our leaders keep saying it so it must be true.
Really… what do innocent people have to hide?
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This article appears in September 03 – 09, 2026.
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