"There's no light on them at all. The status light's turned off in the settings. And the camera on that side is pointed at my gate. It's pointed at the ground. I have pictures of exactly where it's pointed. I can show anybody who wants to see."
"I'm sure you can," Debra said, and it got a laugh. Not a big one. A small, ugly one from somewhere in the back, from someone who had decided already who I was. That laugh was the worst sound I heard all summer.
I sat down because Norm was making a calming gesture at me with both hands, and because I could feel that anything I said standing up would only make it worse. Maisie's screenshot was on my phone. I held it in my lap. In the screenshot you could see my gravel path and my trash cans and the top of my gate and, above the gate, about a foot of beige stucco that was the bottom of the Pelletiers' first-floor wall, and the very bottom edge of their dryer vent. That was it. That was the whole frame. The Pelletiers' master bathroom was on the second floor. Its window was, I would learn later, fifteen feet two inches above grade at the sill.
When public comment came, I went up and said all of that, and I held up my phone, and the people in the first two rows squinted at it. Folasade Eze was in the third row and she didn't squint. She looked at me, and then she looked at Debra, and her face did something I couldn't read.
"That's a screenshot from April," Debra said into the little microphone. "Anyone can move a camera, Leland. You've been up on that ladder plenty."
That was true. I had been up on my ladder plenty. I'd cleaned my gutters in June and replaced a soffit vent in July and I suppose if you'd been watching my house you'd have seen me on that ladder a lot.
"I'll show you the live feed," I said. "Right now. I'll pull it up on my phone and you can see where it's pointed tonight."
"And you could have moved it back this afternoon," Debra said. "This is exactly the problem. There's no way for any of us to know what you've recorded or where it is. That's why the amendment says the recording equipment has to be surrendered. That's the only way any of us can be safe."
Somebody said, "That makes sense." Somebody else said, "He does have a lot of cameras." Somebody, a man I didn't know, who lived on one of the newer streets near the entrance, said, "What do you need four cameras for, anyway? It's Nampa." And I said, "Somebody stole eighteen thousand dollars of equipment out of my truck in March," and he said, "So point them at your truck," and some people laughed again.