Every Car, Everywhere, All at Once—Part 1: License Plate Readers Need Limits, Not Bans
This is the first installment in a three-part series on automated license plate reader technology.
Read the introduction and see other posts here.
Last month, Florida became the first state to bar automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from state highways. Citing concerns about privacy and misuse, Gov. Ron DeSantis said the technology had “gotten out of control” and urged the legislature to go further before Florida became “some type of digital prison.” It was the most prominent salvo yet in a growing backlash against the cameras that has already produced canceled contracts, congressional investigations, vigilante vandalism, and calls to ban them outright.
The fight over Flock Safety, the most prominent ALPR manufacturer, has scrambled the usual politics of policing. Lawmakers accustomed to “backing the blue” suddenly find themselves in the same corner as the American Civil Liberties Union. One unlikely opponent is Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who recently cut off state spending on the company’s contracts. Meanwhile, some of the cameras’ staunchest defenders are local officials in blue cities. The mayor of Miami Beach said ditching the cameras would endanger public safety and announced legislation to “take back control of our roads from the State.”
Both camps have bought into the same false binary that the cameras are either an indispensable crime-fighting tool or the end of privacy as we know it. Neither is true. License plate readers are a useful tool for solving crimes, but they also pose genuine surveillance risks. This debate is the latest in one of the most durable tensions in American life: the balance between security and liberty. Getting it right demands a nuanced consideration of what ALPRs do, whether they work, and what we give up in exchange.
More Than a License Plate Reader
The combination of surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence (AI) has created privacy challenges that even the most paranoid civil liberties advocate could not have imagined a few years ago. Unlike existing red-light cameras that only photograph traffic violations, the new generation of ALPRs log the make, model, color, and location of every passing vehicle. Flock alone operates 120,000 cameras fused into a single national network stretching across 49 states. The scale of the resulting database gives police novel capabilities, allowing an officer in Georgia to scan school zones in Nebraska at the touch of a button. It even allows investigators to rewind time by retracing where an individual traveled, whom they met, and what they did.
Calling the system a “license plate reader” significantly undersells its capability. Flock’s FreeForm search feature lets police query the network using natural language (e.g., “baby blue truck with a rusty fender”) and follow matches wherever they go. With a few more clicks, the officer can run a “convoy analysis” to identify vehicles that frequently travel together, generate a list of those that have visited a single location, and even predict where a car is likely to go next. Public records requests have revealed the system’s capability to search for individual people using descriptions of their clothing, tattoos, and—despite the company’s stated guardrails—race. Some queries are remarkably specific, such as a California Highway Patrol query that sought a “white male about 6ft 1in tall, longer brown hair almost to his shoulders, slender build […] wearing blue jeans, boots with white paint stains on the toes and possibly carrying a black helmet.”
The combination of sweeping surveillance power and scant oversight has produced predictable abuses. Officers have been charged with stalking ex-partners, federal immigration agents have gained unauthorized access, and audit logs show searches justified with entries like “LOL” and “idk.” These scandals have sparked a populist revolt both online and off. In September, Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies arrested a man who pulled up to their headquarters with a pickup truck full of decapitated Flock cameras, referring to them as “tyranny trees.”
Amid the controversy, the genuine use case for ALPRs has nearly disappeared from the conversation. That’s unfortunate because the technology has potential as a force multiplier to help law enforcement agencies improve safety for civilians and police alike. Before deciding whether the backlash is proportionate, it’s worth asking what the cameras actually deliver.
Do ALPRs Reduce Crime?
In theory, using cameras to set up a virtual perimeter is more efficient than setting up a physical one. For example, cameras can act as a substitute for vehicle pursuits, which kill an average of 423 people each year—a quarter of whom are innocent bystanders. Now, rather than initiating a high-speed chase, officers can let a fleeing vehicle escape and use the network to locate it later. Furthermore, defense attorneys routinely subpoena ALPR records to establish alibis that help clear innocent people of wrongdoing.
One of the best anecdotes in support of ALPRs comes from Florida itself. On Sept. 15, 2024, after a Secret Service agent spotted a rifle barrel poking through the fence line of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, a witness photographed a fleeing black Nissan and its plate. A Flock camera picked up the SUV heading north on I-95, and deputies apprehended the would-be assassin that same afternoon. According to then-Sheriff William Snyder, without the alert, “he [the suspect] would’ve gotten away for sure.” He warned that ditching the cameras would result in higher crime rates and lower clearance rates.
ALPRs have proven useful in the search for missing children. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCME) incorporated ALPRs into its AMBER Alert system in 2024. NCME credits the network with contributing to more than 1,000 safe recoveries. In August of this year, a man attacked a woman inside the lobby of the Lake City, Florida, police department and fled with her two children. Officers used Flock to find her vehicle and bring both kids home safe. Days later, cameras in Sabine County, Texas, helped track a suspect’s vehicle across state lines, ultimately recovering a missing girl in Louisiana.
But anecdotes aren’t evidence, and the evaluation literature is remarkably thin for such a widely deployed technology. The only independent, multi-agency evaluation is an August 2026 working paper that analyzed the staggered deployment of fixed Flock cameras across 216 law enforcement agencies between 2017 and 2023. (Crucially, it was the first study to estimate effects across more than one agency.) Researchers identified an 11 percent decrease in motor vehicle theft and a 16 percent increase in clearances following the installation of these cameras. The study found no statistically significant effect on other property crimes like burglary or larceny, and violent crime was outside the scope of the analysis.
New Technology, Familiar Trade-Offs
Policymakers must ask themselves: Are the benefits of ALPRs worth logging the daily travels of millions of people who will never be suspected of a crime?
Even if ALPRs were shown to dramatically improve public safety, that alone would not necessarily justify their unfettered use on American streets. Consider a thought experiment: A new company called “Swarm” invents a microscopic drone that can be mass-produced in sufficient quantities to shadow every American, young and old, day and night. Such a system could theoretically prevent nearly all crime. But would we want it?
Most Americans would recoil at the idea, and for good reason. Allowing some space for misbehavior is how we separate the laws worth keeping from those that need to change. Free societies depend on a gap between what the letter of the law requires and what the state can enforce. That gap is where dissent, experimentation, innovation, and reform take root. The Americans who dumped tea into Boston Harbor, ran the Underground Railroad, or refused to give up their bus seats all broke the law before they changed it. Under a system of perfect surveillance, these “crimes” might have been snuffed out before they could grow into movements.
Perfect public safety comes at a cost. The challenge is determining how much surveillance is necessary to protect the public and how much liberty we should sacrifice in return. The answer is more than none but considerably less than current ALPR architecture allows. Striking the right balance will require sensible guardrails and serious consequences for those who abuse positions of public trust.
The next installment in this series will explore the risks of ALPRs to individual privacy and police legitimacy and analyze relevant case law on how and when the government can track Americans.