The US Park Police are spending $343,000 to lease mobile surveillance cameras from a company that also supplies Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), federal contract records show. The deal comes as Donald Trump has insisted that vandals damaged the reflecting pool, one of Washington’s best-known landmarks – charges that have since been dismissed.
The Department of the Interior, which oversees the Park Police, awarded the lease to the Utah-based company LiveView Technologies (LVT) on 14 September, on a fully obligated government contract that runs through the end of February. The records do not say how many camera trailers are covered.
On Monday, the president posted on Truth Social that “we are watching very closely, and security cameras have been installed” at the reflecting pool. He also warned that anyone who vandalized the newly refilled pool would “GO TO JAIL”.
The Washington Post, which was first to cover the contracts, reported that LVT’s cameras had been installed at Memorial Circle, where Trump wants to build an “Arc de Trump”, and near statues by the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and that Park Police put up other cameras at the reflecting pool as early as June.
The Guardian has not independently confirmed where the leased cameras are, and the contract records do not say.
Trump also did not say who supplied the cameras or where they would be placed, and the records do not say whether the leased equipment is what he was describing.
LVT’s main product is its camera trailers that can be towed to a parking lot, construction site or street corner and set up without permanent wiring. On Tuesday, LVT announced it would add a “thermal-plus-visual” camera from Axis Communications, meant to detect people in low light and “total darkness, glare, rain, fog and smoke”, with shipments expected in December.
The trailers also run software with AI capabilities that LVT says would flag people loitering and read license plates, a feature the company began offering this year to private customers. LVT says its systems “do not actively apply facial recognition”, and that its “customers own their data”.
The latest order adds to LVT’s frequent business with the federal government, particularly with ICE. In March, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division ordered a one-year lease of 26 camera trailers at 10 locations, worth $760,400. In June, another ICE office awarded the company about $2.2m in a separate contract for mobile security units, with a potential completion date of June of next year.
The company has been an approved federal vendor since 2023, when the General Services Administration under Joe Biden added it to its schedule of contractors.
The company’s cameras have drawn controversy from the public and from local governments that have used them. In New York, a Monroe county lawyer complained in 2024 that an LVT trailer placed outside a government building during protests tied to county legislature meetings could see into his office windows, though county officials said the cameras were aimed at the building to protect speakers and attenders and that footage was saved only when needed for an investigation. The company has also faced questions about reliability: last year, Colorado ended a contract for 136 highway cameras after the state said many were offline for long stretches, and said it had withheld about $494,000 in payments.
The interior department and LVT did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
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