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Police departments across Missouri got new rules on Wednesday for the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). Officers must state a “legitimate purpose” for searching databases, agencies are required to audit searches monthly, and all records not tied to an active investigation must be deleted within 30 days.
Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe, who established the regulations via an executive order, isn’t opposed to the increasingly ubiquitous technology. He called the roadside surveillance cameras an “incredibly effective crime-fighting tool.” But he also said he wants lawmakers to turn the new restrictions into state law, with “very serious consequences” for people who break them.
In Wyoming, lawmakers this week considered a substantially more aggressive approach that would ban ALPR cameras from capturing any information other than a license plate, and would require records to be deleted within three minutes if the tag is not found to be relevant to any active investigation or in violation of any law.
State Sen. Chris Rothfuss, a Democrat, said the proposed law seeks to prevent law enforcement from having “casual access” to data systems that can track vehicle movements. He characterized the bill as the most restrictive in the country to date.
We looked at casual access to ALPR databases, like the ones installed by Flock Safety, in an edition of this newsletter earlier this year. Over the summer, the issue exploded into public view. By August, The Washington Post had found more than 50 cases in which officers accessed the databases for unauthorized purposes — frequently men spying on “their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet.”
In at least one recent case, an officer tracked a woman on behalf of someone outside of law enforcement. Last month, police officials in San Jose, California, said an officer searched for a woman who had accused his cousin of domestic violence, then shared information about her whereabouts with the cousin. The officer was fired, but not criminally charged, at least in part because California’s laws around unauthorized searches don't currently cover ALPR data.
This gap is emblematic of a broader problem governments around the country are now scrambling to address: ALPR networks have sprung up much faster than the rules governing their use.
“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation,” Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor who leads the Policing Project, told Vox. “Virtually [no states], in our view, have adequate regulation.”
The regulatory landscape is changing quickly, however. This year alone, state legislatures in Washington, Kentucky and Oregon enacted statewide restrictions on the technology.
Federal lawmakers are also getting involved. There have been at least six separate bills proposed on Capitol Hill to regulate the technology, including two in just the last week. That push has been bipartisan, but much of the recent focus on ALPRs has been propelled by Republicans, and that phenomenon extends beyond Washington, D.C.
In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott barred state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras last month. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has blocked local police departments from installing ALPRs on state roads, with DeSantis saying the technology had gotten “out of control.” The ban went into effect on Wednesday.
Local governments across the country have been considering their own restrictions too, like requiring public approval before police adopt or expand surveillance technology, mandating regular audits and requiring police to document a legitimate reason for every search.
The efforts represent a dramatic increase in scrutiny, but they vary wildly in what they would actually require, how they would be enforced, and how much they can — or theoretically would — constrain the technology.
Recent reporting from Arizona illustrates the limitations of some of these guardrails. Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies are required to enter a case number when they search Flock’s database. While many did, records obtained by the Arizona Mirror found other searches that had been justified with entries like “Facebook,” “a,” “Case,” “eee,” “LAW ENFORCEMENT INVESTIGATION,” “Surveillance” and “search.” The sheriff's office said those entries violated policy and that it has since added more comprehensive audits and other safeguards designed to flag unusual searches.
Defenders of ALPRs point to the audit trail that makes violations like these discoverable as a feature of the system. “Police abuse has existed forever,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Pirate Wires. “The story should be Flock has built a tool that catches bad cops.”
Flock has also tightened its own guardrails amid the backlash, requiring many of the same things that showed up in policy efforts, like mandating more robust rationale for searches and shortening its standard data-retention period from 30 days to seven.
That last change has prompted concerns from some police officials that privacy protections could come at the expense of investigative usefulness. Jimmy Toler, the police chief in Tyler, Texas, told KLTV that sometimes cases don’t even reach a detective before that seven-day window.
Many police officials have touted the benefits of ALPRs in solving individual cases, but measuring the value of the cameras in aggregated crime data is surprisingly difficult.
The first major study to try, which looked specifically at car thefts, found mixed results. Researchers comparing 216 police agencies that adopted Flock with thousands that didn’t found an 11% decline in vehicle theft and a 16% increase in theft clearance rates after the cameras were installed. But a review by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, found that both trends had been moving in the same direction before the cameras arrived, making it difficult to unpack how much the technology actually influenced the improvement.
Other methods of analyzing the same data found no statistically significant decline in thefts at all.
Flock has claimed otherwise. Langley repeatedly said the technology helped solve more than one million crimes last year, but after CBS News scrutinized that figure this week, the company said the “most precise” description was that Flock “supported approximately one million investigations and incidents,” including leads, searches, and other uses that did not necessarily solve a crime.
For many civil libertarians, though, the objection is more fundamental. Even if ALPRs are effective and used responsibly by law enforcement, they create searchable records of the movements of millions of people suspected of no crime. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the technology “invasive mass surveillance.”
Some camera opponents have taken that objection into their own hands. Across the country, Flock cameras have been spray-painted, covered, cut down with power tools, rammed by vehicles and even shot. Local governments have been taking the cameras down by cancelling contracts, too. A database maintained by The Institute for Justice has tallied 247 such cancellations as of this week, many following public opposition over privacy concerns.
That number only includes jurisdictions that have fully cancelled their ALPR use, not merely cancelled one provider to replace it with another. That’s an important distinction, because as 404 Media reported in August, a handful of jurisdictions have responded to public concern about Flock surveillance by switching to a competitor, Axon.
In some cases, the switch addressed a specific concern about Flock. Denver officials, for example, said they were caught off guard by the extent to which outside agencies had searched data collected by the city’s cameras. Axon’s system, unlike Flock’s, does not feed into a nationally searchable network. Critics of these provider swaps say that could change quickly, however.
Axon, now synonymous with police body cameras, first made its name with the Taser, the stun weapon that drew controversy over deaths and police misuse for years. Body cameras and cloud storage for that footage eventually became a much larger part of Axon’s business.
Flock may be attempting a similar evolution. The company, founded in 2017, has made its name selling ALPRs, but Langley says police drones are now its fastest-growing business, and Flock has increasingly pitched itself as a broader public safety technology company.