Public Safety Without Weaponization: A Balanced Approach to Automatic License Plate Readers

Executive Summary

Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have become one of the most contested tools in American policing. More than 200 local governments have canceled or declined to renew their contracts since the start of 2025; Texas and Florida have pulled state support; a Senate subcommittee has opened an investigation into the industry; and House members have introduced bills ranging from a federal funding ban to a federal warrant requirement. Much of that attention falls on Flock Safety, an Atlanta company that reports customers in roughly 6,000 communities and whose name has become shorthand for the technology itself.

The concerns generally fall into three categories. The first is who may run a search and for what reason, because most states have no statute limiting the purpose of a query. More than 70 officers and agency employees nationwide have been investigated, disciplined, fired, or arrested for searches unrelated to any case. The second concern regards how long agencies keep the images, which ranges from seven days under the vendor's current default to 30 months under Georgia law. The third concern is about who else can see the data, because agencies can opt into a national network, and federal agencies have obtained access to state records on terms state law did not permit. Senator Josh Hawley, who opened the Senate investigation, stated the core objection plainly in a letter to the industry: “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.”

None of that is an argument to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however. The same systems recover abducted children, locate missing older adults, and return stolen vehicles, and Americans endorse those uses by margins above 80% while rejecting traffic enforcement and protest monitoring by margins nearly as wide.

This paper explains what ALPRs do, what the evidence shows about whether they work, where the data goes, and what has gone wrong. It then recommends a balanced approach for federal, state, and local policymakers that limits searches to public safety purposes, caps how long images are kept, requires a warrant and a written agreement before a federal agency searches another jurisdiction's cameras, audits searches from outside the unit that runs the system, and makes misuse a crime.

What ALPRs Are and How Police Use Them

An ALPR, mounted on a pole, traffic signal, or patrol vehicle, photographs every vehicle that passes and converts the plate into text. It stores that text alongside the date, time, camera location, and a description of the vehicle, including color, body type, and features like a roof rack or a bumper sticker. According to Flock, the cameras do not photograph faces, run facial recognition, or issue citations. The camera produces a list of times and places where it observed a given plate.

Law enforcement typically uses ALPRs in one of two ways. First, law enforcement compares each passing plate against a hot list and notifies officers within seconds of a match to a stolen vehicle, a wanted suspect, an Amber Alert for an abducted child, or a Silver Alert for a missing older adult. Investigators also search stored images after the fact, in cases where a vehicle is the lead. For example, a plate recorded near the scene of a homicide, a shooting, a robbery, a kidnapping, or a hit-and-run can identify a suspect vehicle or, for a missing person, establish location and direction of travel.

In August 2026, Flock reported having more than 120,000 cameras active across 49 states. An agency can also opt into the company's national lookup network, which lets departments in other jurisdictions search its cameras. A single search by a Texas sheriff's office employee in 2025 reached 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks. What began as a single camera on a street corner could become a national database that thousands of agencies can query.

Do ALPRs Reduce Crime?

Because such widespread camera use is relatively new, research on their efficacy has been limited. The first large independent evaluation, published in August 2026, compared crime data from 216 law enforcement agencies before and after they installed the cameras. Motor vehicle theft fell 11.0% after the cameras went live. Measured against the same agencies' other property crime, which controls for general crime trends, theft fell 5.2%. Arrest clearance rose 15.9%, though clearance had already begun rising before installation, and recovery times for stolen vehicles did not improve.

Regardless of the scant data currently available, there is no question that ALPRs have saved lives. Deputies in Chambers County, Texas, were asked on September 8, 2026, to help find a 12-year-old boy taken from Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, by his non-custodial father, who was believed to be driving toward Mexico. The county operates roughly 30 cameras. Deputies entered the plate, received a match, and located the vehicle at a hotel near the interstate. The boy was recovered safely 16 minutes after the search began, roughly 1,000 miles from where he disappeared.

A September 2026 survey of 1,435 adults by the National Policing Institute found that 88.3% consider it acceptable to use these systems to find missing or abducted children, 83.6% for violent crime, and 81.0% for stolen vehicles, while 25.8% accept use for traffic and parking enforcement and 17.7% for monitoring protests. Six in 10 adults would keep an existing program rather than end it, and 57.5% said safeguards would increase their support. Public support depends on what police are searching for rather than on the technology itself.

Where the Data Goes

Generally, each agency sets retention from the options the vendor offers, which is why neighboring departments can keep the same image for very different periods. Flock reduced its default for new customers from 30 days to seven days in August 2026, while agencies already under contract keep the periods they selected. Virginia requires purging data after 21 days. Georgia allows agencies to hold images for 30 months, which is long enough to reconstruct a driver's weekly routine.

An agency that joins the national lookup network lets departments in other jurisdictions search its cameras. Flock states that nothing is shared automatically and that each agency controls its own data, but once an agency opts in, outside searches run against its cameras without its review, and oversight comes afterward through audit logs. Company records examined by Illinois auditors showed 551 agencies outside Illinois with access to data collected on Illinois roads. In most states, this is not set by statute but by a system administrator.

The Government Accountability Office reported in December 2024 that Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service each held agreements for access to a nationwide plate database, and that agency policies did not always address key privacy protections. In 2025, Illinois auditors found that CBP obtained data on Illinois motorists in violation of state law through a federal pilot program that the vendor's own leadership did not know about.

Potential Concerns

Below are the most commonly cited concerns for the current/general use of ALPRs.

• Searches With No Stated Purpose: In most jurisdictions, nothing requires an officer to tie a query to an open case, and nothing routes it through a supervisor first. A Lufkin, Texas, police officer faces 100 counts of misusing official information for tracking 11 people over more than a year. An Illinois police chief is charged with felony misconduct after running 178 searches on one man. Four Savannah, Georgia, police employees were arrested in August 2026 after an internal audit found searches unconnected to any case. These are improvements, but a vendor can modify its own terms at any time, and it doesn't bind any agency that purchases from a competitor.

• The Reach of a Single Query: The Texas sheriff's office employee who searched 83,345 cameras for one woman entered a case number and a one-line reason, which was all the system required, and it accepted both without review. Nothing capped how many jurisdictions one search could reach.

• Retention Beyond Investigative Need: Images not tied to any case sit in the archive for as long as the agency chooses, up to 30 months in Georgia. The longer the archive, the more completely a series of sightings describes where a person goes and when.

• Audit Logs Other Agencies Cannot Read: Flock narrowed its audit logs in the summer of 2026, so agencies that share data across the network can no longer see the officer’s name, the queried plate, or the stated reason behind searches run by outside departments. The company reports that its own internal audits surfaced most of the misuse cases now under investigation, which argues for making audits mandatory rather than for removing the cameras.

• Misread Plates and Wrongful Stops: The Institute for Justice has documented at least 27 cases since 2018 in which a misread plate or a stale hot list entry produced a wrongful stop, detention, or arrest, with officers drawing firearms in roughly two-thirds of them. In Sherwood, Arkansas, a camera misread a plate by one letter in February 2026, and officers stopped a couple at gunpoint with their infant in the back seat before realizing the error.

What Congress Has Done So Far

Senator Josh Hawley opened an investigation into Flock Safety on August 26, 2026, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. His letter to the company demanded records on who may access the system, how long data is retained, what justification a search requires, accuracy and false-positive rates, and every known instance of misuse since January 2021. Senator Hawley subsequently extended the inquiry to Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and Axon.

Members of Congress have taken two legislative approaches. First, the Flock-Off Act, a bipartisan House bill, would bar federal funds for these systems and require federal agencies to remove federally funded cameras within 180 days, with carve-outs for the border and toll collection. The PRIVACY Act would keep the cameras in service, but federal law enforcement would need a warrant before querying state or local plate data, and retention would be capped at 30 days unless the data is evidence in a prosecution. A similar bill from Representatives Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert goes further, requiring a warrant before state and local agencies use the cameras at all.

What the States Have Done So Far

Twenty-four states have a statute governing ALPRs, and 26 have none, according to an August 2026 scorecard from the Policing Project at New York University School of Law. Below are some recently passed bills, proposed policies, or other important updates to state legislation regulating ALPRs.

Washington

Washington's law lists the purposes for which police may conduct a search; bars collection at hospitals, schools, houses of worship, and courthouses; requires deletion after 21 days; requires two years of audit records; bars a stop based on a camera match alone; and makes evidence from an unlawful search inadmissible. Washington’s law also contains objectionable policies, including prohibiting their use in federal immigration enforcement.

Montana, Maryland, Georgia, and Illinois

Montana provides that a match alone does not constitute reasonable suspicion for a stop and caps retention at 90 days. Maryland bars the sale of plate data and makes misuse punishable by up to a year in jail. Georgia makes misuse a criminal offense but allows agencies to keep images for 30 months. Illinois bars certain uses of ALPR data but attaches no penalty for violations. When its Secretary of State found in 2025 that federal agents had obtained Illinois data in violation of that law, the state had no sanction to impose, and the episode ended with the vendor voluntarily pausing its federal pilots.

Texas and Pennsylvania

Governor Greg Abbott barred Texas agencies from spending state funds on Flock cameras on August 28, 2026, after the Lufkin case and investigations or charges involving officers at six other Texas agencies in the same month. Three days later, Florida's Department of Transportation revoked every permit for readers in state highway rights-of-way and gave agencies 30 days to remove them, citing the rapid growth of deployments along state roads, along with reports of misuse and privacy concerns. Pennsylvania's Department of General Services removed Flock from the state purchasing portal in September.

California

Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a 2025 bill that would have required agencies to delete plate data after 60 days, writing that investigators often do not learn that they need the data until after such a deadline has passed, particularly in cold cases, and that limits on sharing between agencies could hinder the pursuit of suspects crossing jurisdictional lines during crimes in progress.

Virginia

In 2025, Virginia passed HB 2724, which requires agencies to purge images after 21 days unless the data is part of an ongoing investigation, and its statute limits searches to specific law enforcement purposes. Governor Abigail Spanberger said on September 4, 2026, that calls to ban the cameras outright are overly simplistic, stating, “There are many improvements that could be made before we're looking at actually taking a really vital tool to solve crimes, to find abducted or missing children, to take those tools kind of out of the toolbox.” Further reforms are expected to be considered in the 2027 Session.

What Cities and Counties Have Done So Far

More than 200 cities and counties have canceled or declined to renew contracts since the start of 2025. Arlington County, Virginia, followed suit in September 2026, voting to remove its 26 plate readers and 15 other Flock cameras within 14 business days, even though the county had found no misuse. Milwaukee took a different path, keeping its cameras and restricting access to supervisors, limiting searches to serious crimes and critical missing persons, and requiring semiannual independent audits by its Fire and Police Commission. Grand Rapids placed its 31 cameras under the city surveillance policy, which requires commission approval to expand the program and an annual public report. Mayor Cavalier Johnson of Milwaukee, announcing his restrictions, said the tool “has located critical missing persons and helped apprehend violent criminals.”

Recommendations for Congress

• Require a Warrant and a Written Agreement for Federal Access: A federal agency seeking to search state or local plate data should obtain a warrant or court order and operate under a published agreement with the agency that owns the cameras, with a narrow, documented exception for abductions and imminent threats to life. The same rule should apply to every federal agency.
• Condition Federal Grants Rather Than Cutting Off Funding: Federal grants that pay for this equipment should condition the money on requirements from the receiving agency, including a published policy, a case number logged for every search, a retention limit, and regular audits.
• Close the Open Federal Privacy Recommendations and Build No National Database: No federal agency should subscribe to a permanent nationwide plate search capability without express authorization from Congress.

Recommendations for the States

• Limit Use of ALPRs to Public Safety Purposes: Statute should list the uses that are permitted, including Amber and Silver Alerts, missing and endangered persons, stolen vehicles and plates, violent felonies, and human trafficking. Parking and traffic enforcement, unpaid fines, civil debt collection, and personal use should be greatly restricted or not permitted at all. Tracking lawful religious or political activity should be barred by statute rather than left to department policy.
• Set Retention Limits and Bar Resale: Images not tied to an open case should be deleted within a short, fixed window, with 21 days already tested in Virginia and Washington, while images tied to a case are preserved separately as evidence. No vendor or third party should be permitted to sell or reuse the data, and sharing with agencies outside the state should require a written agreement and a specific case.
• Require Independent Audits, Public Reporting, and Criminal Penalties: Every search should record a case number and a named user, and audits should be conducted from outside the unit that operates the system. Each agency should publish its policy and report annually on how many searches it ran, how many produced an arrest, and what its audits found. Misuse should be a crime as it is in Georgia and Maryland, and an agency that fails an audit should lose network access until it corrects the failure.
• Require Officers to Confirm a Plate Before Making a Stop: A camera match is a lead and not reasonable suspicion. Officers should confirm the plate and the vehicle before stopping a driver, as Washington and Montana already require.

Recommendations for Cities and Counties

• Approve New Cameras by Public Vote: A council should vote on any new or expanded system and adopt a written policy before the first camera goes up.
• Set the Terms in the Vendor Contract: The agency should own the data, the vendor should be barred from reselling it, retention should follow local policy rather than the vendor’s default, and network sharing should remain off unless the council votes to turn it on.
• Limit Who Can Search and Review Those Searches Quarterly: Access should run to supervisors or a trained unit rather than to every officer with a login, a reviewer outside that unit should audit quarterly, and the results should go to the council and the public each year.

Conclusion

Policymakers do not have to choose between public safety and privacy, and the past two years show why. A 12-year-old boy came home safely because a deputy in Texas could search a camera network in 16 minutes. A woman in that same state was searched for across 83,345 cameras by an employee who supplied nothing more than a case number and a one-line reason. The same system produced both results, because no rule stood between that second search and the data. The question is whether the rules governing these cameras will be written by legislatures, by vendors through default settings, or by courts through rulings that throw out evidence years from now.

Federal, state, and local officials can settle that question this session without giving up anything that works. Listing permitted purposes preserves every use Americans support by margins above 80% and forecloses the uses they reject. Retention limits preserve evidence in open cases while deleting the images that describe innocent people's routines. Independent audits and criminal penalties for misuse protect the public from the few officers who abuse these systems and give the many who do not have the means of proving it on their own. Jurisdictions that adopt these measures will keep a tool that finds abducted children and recovers stolen vehicles, while protecting the valid privacy interests of their citizens.