RTD agrees to share camera feeds with Aurora police

AURORA, Colo. — The Aurora City Council on Monday night approved an agreement between the Regional Transportation District (RTD) and Aurora police, which will allow APD access to RTD’s camera feeds in the city.

Those cameras are placed on RTD property, including dozens of bus and rail stations.

“We’ve never had to clear any hurdles with them providing that footage to us,” Aurora Sgt. Matthew Longshore told Denver7. “This is just one of those elements now that we actually have footage readily available to our investigators or our officers, in that real time… We would be able to view it live. We’d be able to go back 12, 24 hours to kind of view what happened previously.”

Longshore called the agreement an expansion of the agencies’ already strong partnership.”

“This is about public safety,” he said. “The more eyes we have in the community, the better.”

This is the latest example of Aurora police promoting technology as a potential solution to fight crime. In the fall, the department gained approval to use artificial intelligence facial recognition technology.

But that move and others, including the use of drones and automated license plate cameras known as Flock cameras, have sparked privacy and transparency concerns in Aurora and around the Denver metro.

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A public commenter from the Denver Aurora Community Action Committee spoke out against the AI facial technology and increased surveillance in general during Monday’s Aurora City Council meeting.

“You cannot impose surveillance technology on a community that does not trust you, and that distrust is earned,” she said. “How can we possibly trust APD with this tool when there is a non-zero chance they will share our faces and data with agencies like ICE?”

“You ask us to trust a pipeline of surveillance that leads directly to deportation and death.”

APD says the cameras are only meant to respond to 911 calls or to address broader crime trends.

“If you know, we have an increase in crime, or if there’s something suspicious happening in the area,” Longshore said. “There’s typically an audit log that’s available on all of our cameras, so we can see who’s viewing it and when. There are certain things in place to be able to make sure that officers are doing things specifically for certain reasons.

Denver7 reached out to RTD for comment on the agreement and is waiting to hear back.

RTD agrees to share camera feeds with Aurora Police

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