Seven Employees. A PO Box. And They Are Mapping Every Camera On Your Street. CrimeWatch Technologies runs the surveillance camera registry program in your Montgomery County township. This is who they are, where the money came from, and what their privacy policy actually says.

There is a company called CrimeWatch Technologies that most people in Montgomery County have never heard of, and that anonymity is not an accident. It is the product. The less you know about who is running the surveillance infrastructure in your township, the easier it is to keep running it. CrimeWatch Technologies has seven employees. It operates out of a suite at 275 Cumberland Parkway in Mechanicsburg Pennsylvania and lists a PO box in a town called East Berlin. It has raised approximately twenty thousand dollars in disclosed private funding. And right now, today, the township police departments in Montgomery Township, Upper Merion, Upper Providence, and Upper Moreland are using CrimeWatch’s platform to collect and store the locations, angles, serial numbers, and footage agreements of every home security camera your neighbors have agreed to register. Seven people in a Mechanicsburg office suite are building the surveillance map of your neighborhood on behalf of your local police, and what follows is a documented account of who they are, where the money came from, what their platform actually does beyond what the township website tells you, and why no legislator in Pennsylvania has said a single public word about any of it.

WHERE THIS COMPANY CAME FROM In 2009 a man named Matt Bloom had a business idea. He was going to publish a magazine. The magazine would print the photographs and home addresses of registered sex offenders and distribute it across south central Pennsylvania counties. That was the product. That was the vision that Matt Bloom sat down and decided to build a company around. That magazine grew into a statewide publication over two and a half years, and then Bloom decided print had limits and the future was technology, and CrimeWatch Technologies was born out of that conclusion. The company now operating in your township, managing your neighbor’s camera registration, publishing local arrest records, running what they describe as a special needs registry across law enforcement jurisdictions with zero jurisdictional restrictions, started as a sex offender photo distribution business run out of south central Pennsylvania. That is not an accusation. That is the company’s own origin story, documented in their own press materials and funding announcements. The co-founder that CrimeWatch does not lead with in their community-friendly marketing is Michael Grucz, who built the technical infrastructure underneath the platform. Grucz is described in company materials as a professional with over two decades of experience in systems architecture, infrastructure administration, security and intelligence, holding patents in the security domain and having worked on enterprise big data and machine learning projects. That is the technical architecture behind the platform your township police department invited into your neighborhood’s camera infrastructure.

WHO PAID FOR IT The first significant outside money into CrimeWatch came from Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners of Central and Northern Pennsylvania, which is a state backed venture fund created by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and capitalized with public money. The taxpayers of Pennsylvania funded the early growth of the company now embedded in Pennsylvania’s law enforcement infrastructure. When CrimeWatch expanded into Bucks County and rolled out across twenty eight police departments at once, the District Attorney publicly thanked the county’s Emergency Management director for obtaining a homeland security grant to fund the CrimeWatch subscriptions for all county departments for at least a year. Federal tax dollars flowing through a county emergency management office into a private company’s bank account. No competitive bidding process documented. Someone found a grant, the grant fit the platform, and CrimeWatch got paid. That is their expansion model. Police departments rarely have the budget for new technology but they almost always have someone who can locate a homeland security or community policing grant, and once the platform is in the door and the officers are trained on it and the neighbors are registered and the data is collected, the subscription renews itself because nobody wants to restart from zero. Public money plants the flag. The subscription collects the return.

WHAT THEIR PRIVACY POLICY ACTUALLY SAYS CrimeWatch publishes a privacy policy. It contains standard language about collecting technical data and user information for service provision and support. What is not standard is the section where they explicitly carve out of their own privacy protections any personal information related to arrest records, criminal charges, Megan’s Law information, criminal history, or other material they classify as public record. What that means in practice is this. If your name goes up on a CrimeWatch post connected to an arrest, a charge, or an accusation, and those charges are later dropped, or the arrest was a mistake, or you were never convicted of anything, CrimeWatch’s privacy policy does not protect you. They classify it as public record and their protections do not extend to it. The removal process compounds the problem. According to CrimeWatch’s own published removal documentation, submitting a removal request requires a twenty dollar non-refundable money order made out to CrimeWatch Technologies, mailed to their address in Mechanicsburg. Staff will then review the request and render a decision. There is no timeline guaranteed beyond that. There is no law in Pennsylvania requiring them to comply. There is no appeals process beyond whatever the company decides internally. The privacy policy is publicly available and worth reading in full at crimewatchus.com/privacy-policy. The removal documentation is linked from the same site.

THE SPECIAL NEEDS REGISTRY CrimeWatch’s product list includes a Special Needs Registry. This is a database of residents with disabilities, cognitive impairments, medical conditions, and special needs, registered in the CrimeWatch system and accessible to law enforcement across jurisdictional lines. The company’s own materials describe the platform as providing zero jurisdictional restrictions. A private company that started as a sex offender photo magazine, seeded with state money, co-founded by a security intelligence professional with patents in the security domain, is operating a registry of the most vulnerable people in your community across a national law enforcement network with no jurisdictional walls and no legislative oversight anywhere in Pennsylvania. That is the current situation, documented in the company’s own product descriptions.

THE NETWORK THEY OPERATE IN Matt Bloom recently attended a conference hosted by CODY Systems and posted about it on LinkedIn describing it as an incredible event and a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with friends. CODY Systems is the Premier Sponsor of the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association, the private nonprofit that owns JNET, the statewide facial recognition database that lets over 500 law enforcement agencies search your face against your driver’s license photo without a warrant or notification requirement. The CEO of CrimeWatch considers the people at the top of that structure friends worth reconnecting with at conferences. CrimeWatch’s Director of Business Development is a retired Assistant Chief County Detective who now attends PCPA conferences on CrimeWatch’s behalf, networks with active police chiefs and commissioners, and posts publicly about his meetings with Pennsylvania government officials. The relationships he built as a public servant paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers are now being applied on behalf of a private company selling back into those same agencies. CrimeWatch Technologies is listed as a Business Partner of the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association on the PCPA’s public sponsor page, alongside Axon and DataWorks Plus. The PCPA is the same organization whose most recent independent audit identified material noncompliance with the laws and grant agreements governing its federal money, and a significant deficiency in internal controls. That audit is public record available through the Federal Audit Clearinghouse.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS What exists in Montgomery County right now is a privately operated surveillance infrastructure built on public grants, embedded in township police departments through a business partnership with a private nonprofit that is itself exempt from public records law, managed by a company with seven employees whose CEO built his first business distributing sex offender photographs and whose co-founder holds patents in the security domain. The camera registry running in Montgomery Township, Upper Merion, Upper Providence, and Upper Moreland is one piece of that infrastructure. The special needs registry is another. The arrest record publishing platform with a twenty dollar non-refundable money order removal fee is another. None of it was subject to a public vote. None of it is governed by Pennsylvania law. None of it has been the subject of a legislative hearing. The contracts were approved quietly at the township level, funded through homeland security and state venture grants, and renewed on subscription while the oversight question went unasked. The PCPA lists CrimeWatch as a Business Partner on the same page where Axon and DataWorks Plus buy their sponsorships. The PCPA audit flagging material noncompliance with federal grant requirements is public record. The Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners investment is documented. The Bucks County DA press conference thanking emergency management for the homeland security grant is on the record. Matt Bloom’s LinkedIn describing the CODY Systems conference as a fantastic opportunity to reconnect with friends is publicly visible. All of it is documented. None of it has been answered for.

WHAT CAN BE DONE File a right to know request with your township. Ask for the full CrimeWatch contract, the annual cost, any data sharing agreements, and documentation of who approved the relationship and when. Every township has a right to know officer and the process is on every township website. Ask your township supervisors at the next public meeting what happens to the registered camera data if CrimeWatch is acquired, goes out of business, or gets hacked. Ask who owns that data if the company disappears. Ask whether the special needs registry data is shared with any agency outside the township. Ask for the answers in writing on the record. Ask your state representative why Pennsylvania has no law governing what a private company can do with the surveillance data it collects on behalf of local police departments. Fifteen other states have passed such laws. Pennsylvania has not introduced one. CrimeWatch Technologies can be reached at support@crimewatchus.com and 717-230-1845. They are a private company operating on public grants and public trust and written questions directed to them are entirely appropriate.

There is no safety in surveillance.

The Sentinel — Montgomery County Pennsylvania.