Police surveillance happens, in small ways and bigger ones, throughout Monterey County.

On May 20, the killing of day laborer Carlos Mejia by Salinas police was recorded by an East Salinas woman with a cellphone camera. The video, posted to YouTube shortly after the shooting, shows Mejia carrying a pair of gardening shears and walking through the neighborhood around Del Monte Avenue and North Sanborn Road. Police were following him, attempting to get him to surrender, shortly after they were called to the area on a report that Mejia had attempted to break into a home, exposed himself to a female resident and tried to strangle the homeowner’s dog.

The video shows Mejia, shears in hand, nearing the busy intersection. In the final seconds of his life, he appears to turn toward one of the officers, who by then was just feet away; the officer and his partner open fire.

The killing, the third of four officer-involved fatal shootings in 2014, set off heated protests in East Salinas. A police car was destroyed, an officer who went to the aid of a mortally wounded man hit by random gunfire was hit in the head with a bottle and in the days and weeks to come – and still today, in fact – the heavy specter of mistrust of police hangs in the air.

The killing set off something else too. Two days after the shooting, Salinas police installed surveillance cameras on streetlight poles overlooking the area of the shooting.

“Cams installed because witnesses were being intimidated,” explains the Twitter account of @SalinasPD, June 4. It’s a statement a Salinas-based Twitter user with the handle @ThinkMexican debated: “Because of cameras, teenage witness says she isn’t sleeping and eating well, feels intimidated. Your logic is backward @SalinasPD.”

The cameras were later pulled so the police could post them around the rodeo grounds for the California Rodeo Salinas. There, police say, they were used to help locate a child lost in the crowd.

Welcome to the ultimate 21st-century civil rights conundrum, of privacy vs. security and watching vs. being watched. It’s a subject that has been at the forefront of policy debates as surveillance ramped up in post-9/11 America and Europe. Lower Manhattan, according to an article in Slate.com, is dotted with thousands of security cameras, some owned by business owners, but many others owned and monitored by the NYPD. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates some 24,000 cameras are in use in Chicago, including red-light cameras to monitor intersections and so-called “blue light” cameras that monitor neighborhoods for crime. And in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle, a network of 350 cameras downtown, funded by $14 million in Department of Homeland Security grants, watch areas with heavy pedestrian traffic and critical infrastructure – and officials are looking to add to that network.

Locally, surveillance isn’t that sophisticated. Not yet, anyway.

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As Salinas deals with old surveillance technology and considers if and how to buy new, it also deals with how and where to deploy it – and how to tackle community mistrust when they do.

That comes in stark contrast to Seaside, which thanks to a freebie technology offer from the Naval Postgraduate School and a $100,000 grant from the Florida-based Dunspaugh-Dalton Foundation (a DDF trustee, Sarah Bonner, lives in Pebble Beach), late last month began installing a highly sophisticated system called Spacio-Temporal Event Management Architecture cameras, or STEMA.

The Weekly undertook a survey of the police departments of all Peninsula cities, as well as Salinas, to find out what surveillance technologies are being used, how the recorded footage is stored and who has the right to access it. (See chart, above.) In addition to their responses, we spoke to various police chiefs and command staff about how use of technology impacts their respective cities, and to a leading privacy advocate on what citizens should look for as law enforcement increases its use of cameras.

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In Salinas, the four cameras in use – not including cameras mounted in each of the department’s patrol units – are portable, save for one permanently mounted in drug-ridden Chinatown. But they are old and slow and prone to breaking down. These are the same cameras, Salinas Police Chief Kelly McMillin says, that were used in East Salinas after the Mejia shooting, and at the rodeo grounds for crowd security. The four allow for live-viewing via a cellular connection.

“We generally put them up on an as-needed basis, for example when we get specific complaints about stolen bikes in a particular area, or some other problem in a public area,” Salinas Police Cmdr. Mike Groves writes in an email. “These cameras record [but, due to age, not all the time]. They frequently go down and have to be taken down and fixed for a wide array of reasons.”

They have potential to be great tools for high-risk areas, Groves adds, but the department would need to update the cameras with newer technology.

If voters approve a public-safety tax measure slated for the November ballot, McMillin hopes to purchase body-worn cameras for his officers. It’s a move that has caused concern from the Salinas police union; union president Gabriel Carvey has publicly stated the cameras, from a police officer’s perspective, are “invasive.” But McMillin goes back to the cell phone video that captured only a portion of the events that led to the Mejia shooting, and says the body cameras could give police an advantage, both in criminal court and in the court of public opinion.

“The reality is that we’re being recorded much of the time anyway. On July 4, I was writing a kid a ticket and I had two people recording the whole interaction on their cell phones,” McMillin says. “If I’m going to have video of me out there conducting myself as a police officer, isn’t the best video the first-person perspective, where my voice is recorded and my perspective is seen?

“To think we’re not being videotaped the whole time is foolhardy,” he adds. “That’s the age we live in.”

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In Seaside, where reports of gunfire have become increasingly common and where 13 shootings and eight killings have been reported since 2013, police are looking at a sophisticated surveillance system to help quell some of the violence.

Through a combination of Department of Defense largesse and that $100,000 grant, Seaside police last month began installing the first of its STEMA cameras. The cameras – so far there are four, with plans for more – have been placed at locations throughout the city, and while they’re not hidden, Seaside police refuse to say where they’re located.

Local representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern about privacy rights and potential violations in light of the location secrecy, and the sophistication of the system. The cameras are stationary and don’t track motion, nor do they have facial recognition capabilities.

But Police Chief Vicki Myers says what makes the system unique is it gives police the ability to search specific times and specific dates.

“Say a crime occurred. In other systems you’d have to watch for hours to find the relevant footage. With STEMA, you can say, ‘Camera #2, find something from Sept. 2, 11am-noon,’” she says.

The length of storage depends on how many cameras are attached to the system; while each camera only costs about $600, the technology that supports those cameras cost about $5,000 each. The cameras can record 24 hours a day, and the footage is stored on a server, which has the capacity to store video from four cameras for 12 months. SSPD’s policy requires the non-evidentiary footage to be purged or overwritten after 30 days.

When STEMA was first proposed last year, Seaside’s old-school black activists turned out in force to a City Council meeting to champion the plan. Many noted the uptick in violence.

“For the first time in the 50 years I’ve been in Seaside, I’m really afraid,” said Helen Rucker, one prominent activist. “I know what it’s like for civil liberties to be taken. But these are different times now.”

Seaside’s STEMA is governed by a written policy (to read it, visit the document set attatched to this story online at www.mcweekly.com). The department also has a five-member community-based liaison committee. So far, the system is too new to have recorded much of anything, and Myers says there’s also been a technology glitch involving a radio signal.

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Monterey Police Chief Phil Penko almost cringes as he says it: “It’s going to create a political nightmare, but I’m more interested in drone technology than fixed cameras,” he says.

“But I’m not putting in a grant to get a drone,” he adds. “I promise.“

Monterey seems to be one of the least surveilled cities in the county, for now. Monterey police cars are equipped with dash cams, and the city in June finished a grant application for 30 new side-view cameras. Those would be mounted on the city’s 15 patrol cars to increase the field of vision that gets recorded by existing cameras that cover only views immediately in front of and behind police cars.

The West and East garages are also equipped with cameras, but the city has no cameras placed to surveil public places, and doesn’t have plans for any either.

Monterey (“knock wood,” Penko says) is a relatively safe community. People feel safe and comfortable, Penko adds, and he hasn’t gotten much feedback on use of surveillance technology – not that Monterey has much of it anyway. “What good does it do, 99 percent of the time, to have a camera at, say, Fremont and Abrego?” he asks. At some point – Penko predicts it will happen in the next seven years – all officers will be required to don body-worn cameras, which have the capability to record wider activity in front of an officer as well as specific encounters with citizens.

“It’s a great way to shoot what’s transpired between an officer and a member of the community and it’s hard to refute,” Penko says. “It serves to provide an unquestionable snapshot of what transpired.”

Penko says his interest in drones extends to specific-use only.

“I look at it in terms of major events, like when we used to get 40,000 or 50,000 people on the beach for Fourth of July. Being able to monitor a crowd from an aerial standpoint would be fantastic,” he says. “If we have someone missing at a park, or in the hills above Del Monte, it would give us the ability to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time.”

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Privacy advocates are keeping an eye on the government agencies keeping an eye on everyone else, including local police department use of technology.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes communities have to watch how surveillance technology gets deployed, down to the details of what are the policies for holding on to footage and who is allowed to look at it – and why.

The San Francisco-based EFF, whose tagline is “defending your rights in the digital world,” advocates for privacy rights and civil liberties in contemporary times, tackling issues such as warrantless surveillance, data protection and government surveillance. One of its projects is a surveillance self-defense site meant to educate the public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the U.S.

When it comes to video surveillance, Fakhoury fires off a rapid list of what he’s seen in other places: cameras placed specifically in poor communities of color; cameras placed at spots of past crime reports; cameras pointed at private homes (rather than at a street or public area) without a warrant; cameras without written policies on how the recordings are safeguarded or who’s allowed to view them.

“These are the things people need to be looking for to see it’s not being abused,” Fakhoury says, “that it’s being used for safety and to solve crimes, not to pervasively spy on people all the time.”

Additional reporting by Kera Abraham, David Schmalz and Sara Rubin.