It's fundamentally a security camera, for many people. People buy them to see what's going on, record crimes for reporting, and to feel safer. I think there's significant overlap in people who want to feel safer and people being ok with the police being able to look through their cameras, since being able to record events, for the police, was part of the motivation for the purchase of a security camera. My frail elderly grandpa, who has seen his neighborhood go to shit with the reduced police funding, would definitely see this as a "nice feature".

I, a law abiding & legal citizen want more of these cameras in public places. Are you trying to achieve an utopia for criminals and illegal aliens?

Have you read "Brave New World"? It predicted the future better than "1984".

Many of them have been.

IANAL, but if you are to take action it might be most prudent to do so non-destructively.

Putting a bag over the camera/solar panel or taking it down and returning the lost/abandoned property would leave it disabled just as well.

The added damage of outright destroying it would make no real difference to the company (might even just make them more money) but would make it easier to characterize the action as criminally motivated rather than an act of conscience in the public interest.

Every time they're discussed, I think of that scene of Homer bashing a weather station in the 70s[1]

[1] https://youtu.be/zexJJb9Lbas