Republican governors defund the license-plate cameras their own police just credited with solving crime.

…(cont) Same week, Pennsylvania. Stacy Garrity, the Republican nominee running to unseat Governor Josh Shapiro, told her campaign she supports banning Flock cameras statewide, calling the network an "intrusive invasion of privacy." Three Republican officials, in three different states, inside a single week, each finding a reason to turn against a surveillance tool their own party built out.

And here's the part that doesn't fit the file folder marked civil liberties: the same week these cameras got cut, the New York Times was quoting police departments explaining that the cameras help solve crimes. Not abstractly — that's the stated justification for the systems in the first place. NPR's read on it is broader still: heading into the midterms, candidates from both parties are finding reasons to run against Flock, each for their own version of the same discomfort with being tracked.

A tool doesn't usually get killed by the people who paid for it and the people running against them in the same election cycle. When that happens, the tool isn't the target. Something about who holds the data, who can query it, and who gets to decide that later is the actual fight, and the privacy language is what both sides reach for when they don't want to say that part out loud.

The cameras in Dallas go dark September 15. The police who say they need them will still be working the same streets on September 16. The governor who pulled the funding will still be governor. That's the whole trick: the tool disappears, the argument about it disappears with it, and the people who wanted it gone in the first place never had to say what they actually wanted gone.