These Cameras Save Lives. But Some Want Them Banned

Almost every move Americans make is now caught on camera—often one we’re holding ourselves. We photograph and film our proudest and most mundane moments, uploading them to the cloud without a second thought. That’s what makes the growing opposition to automated license plate readers (ALPRs) so perplexing.

Calls for an outright ban on the technology are growing louder. Some opponents have even taken to sabotaging and destroying the cameras on city streets. But the pushback against ALPRs is misguided, reflecting a misunderstanding of both what the technology actually does and the benefits it provides.

One company, Flock Safety, has become the movement’s primary target. Flock cameras, like other ALPRs, capture information about vehicles—not the people inside them—as they pass. They record license plates, along with details such as a car’s make, model, color, and distinguishing features, including bumper stickers, custom paint, or visible damage. That information is stored by flock on behalf of its customers (who actually own the data) for short periods, allowing them to track, and in some cases intercept, vehicles involved in criminal activity.

That police sometimes want to keep an eye out for vehicles of interest shouldn’t be controversial. Agencies have done that as part of AMBER Alerts for years. The idea was simple and uncontroversial: widely disseminating information about such vehicles could help turn ordinary citizens into intelligence assets in child-abduction cases, when time is crucial. AMBER alerts have unquestionably saved lives. The widespread adoption of advanced ALPRs would build on what has been gained from AMBER alerts by making it easier to find vehicles when time is of the essence.

But that hasn’t stopped politicians from across the spectrum—at both the federal and local levels—from announcing support for legislation banning or restricting the deployment of ALPRs. Republican and Democratic members of Congress including Thomas Massie, Tim Burchett, Anna Paulina Luna, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, and Scott Perry have taken up the anti-Flock cause, urged on by a host of advocacy groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, Americans for Prosperity, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In West Virginia, the Democratic House Caucus issued a statement opposing the technology, and it found an ally in the GOP’s Freedom Caucus. In other parts of the country, opponents have gotten Flock contracts cancelled or had data-retention periods shortened to the point of absurdity.

Why reject a technology that helps police quickly locate vehicles reportedly used in serious crimes? Foes of ALPRs are largely united around a single objection: privacy.

On his popular podcast, comedian Theo Von captured the increasingly alarmist tone of the debate: “[Y]ou mentioned like a surveillance state. . . . And it feels like sometimes in America that we’re getting to that like with a lot of these Flock cameras and a lot of these data centers . . . it feels like they’re just going to hold all the information from all this recording that’s going on in this surveillance state.” On his show, John Oliver spent half an hour railing against police surveillance tools like ShotSpotter (acoustic gunshot detection technology) and—you guessed it—Flock cameras, which he called “wildly invasive” insofar as they could “track your movements wherever you go, which means they can find out if you, say, attended a protest or visited an abortion clinic.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s David Dunmoyer recently asserted in the Daily Wire that Flock cameras represent “an assault” on our “constitutional freedoms.” That sounds bad—but is it true?

For starters, there is no right not to be photographed in public—whether by private citizens or by the government. So-called First Amendment auditors take joy in illustrating this fact. There’s now a whole genre of YouTube content featuring self-styled auditors obnoxiously filming people in public to get them to call the police, who are often forced to admit they can do nothing. Filming public space is, in fact, protected activity.

In addition, the Fourth Amendment has never been understood to prohibit law enforcement officers from observing what is in plain view from a place where they are lawfully present. If an officer walking past a car sees contraband on the front seat, he may act on that observation—even without a warrant.

ALPR opponents like Dunmoyer suggest that government photographing your vehicle in public violates some vaguely defined right to privacy, and that such “privacy is a fundamental prerequisite to being free.” But by that standard, every A-list celebrity in America is a slave, and every traffic-enforcement camera is a constitutional violation.

If ALPRs are so detrimental to freedom, why haven’t these harms become apparent in jurisdictions where the technology has been in use for over two decades? A 2012 article in Ars Technica warned, for example, that unregulated cameras were already “collecting millions of travel records every day.” It informed readers that the NYPD had been using ALPRs since 2006 and had deployed nearly 250 such cameras throughout the city. One can make a case that constitutional freedoms have been curtailed in New York City since that time—in recent years, courts have overturned state and city gun regulations, voting rules, and labor laws—but ALPRs have had nothing to do with it.

The notion that local governments are using these cameras to compile long-term logs of Americans’ movements runs up against several realities. For one, such an effort would quickly create enormous data-storage demands. For another, Flock cameras default to retaining data for no more than 30 days, a setting that most jurisdictions leave unchanged. Many police departments also impose their own restrictions on which vehicles can be searched and under what circumstances. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the technology can’t be misused (as shown by a handful of cases involving police officers using department assets to track people for personal reasons). But these abuses don’t justify a rejection of the technology any more than some cases of excessive force justify condemnation of policing as an institution.

Nevertheless, defenders of the technology shouldn’t dismiss these concerns. The clearest risk, however, isn’t Orwellian surveillance but rather the use of ALPRs to create “a general enforcement dragnet for civil and code violations,” as my colleague Brandon Fuller recently warned in an X post. Cities should ensure that the cameras do not become tools for generating revenue by enforcing every parking or traffic infraction. If every instance of modest speeding or rolling through a stop sign results in a ticket arriving in the mail, a backlash is inevitable—one that could undermine public support for ALPRs and prevent the technology from realizing its crime-fighting potential. That would be a real disaster.

Every technological advance brings both benefits and risks. Banning technologies in anticipation of harms that have yet to materialize is the wrong approach to policymaking. Where a technology presents genuine risks, policymakers can act to mitigate them. That’s the approach we should take with Flock and other ALPRs.