Allie was the picture of a typical 12-year-old girl—pink-and-white-striped shirt, blue jeans, and a PINK backpack, blond hair askew—the day she was taken. She later told police she thought she was meeting a 15-year-old boy, whom she’d first spoken to online and with whom she expected to be in a relationship. Instead, when Allie (whose name I’ve changed for this story) climbed into the black Chevy Malibu that afternoon, she found 31-year-old Brandon Britten. He drove them across three states, to his home in Independence County, Arkansas. Britten and his wife Sierra had conspired to abduct Allie, police allege, talking with her online for a month and even soliciting nude images. Upon returning home, Sierra told police, Brandon had “taken the child back into their bedroom while she slept in their young son’s bedroom.”
Back in Woodruff, South Carolina, law enforcement began a fevered hunt for Allie. They thought she had gone to Arkansas or Texas, Spartanburg County sheriff Bill Rhyne told me, but were at “a dead standstill” until they found a surveillance-camera image of Allie entering the car. They fed a description of the vehicle—they had no license plate—into Flock Safety’s license plate reader database, which can track cars based on their appearance. “Without [Flock’s] technology, we would be at a complete standstill,” Rhyne told local media.
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After a few hours of combing the results, investigators found further images of Britten’s car, driving south through Alabama and into Arkansas. At 3 p.m., Spartanburg called the Independence County Sheriff’s Office; 90 minutes later, police had arrested the Brittens and recovered Allie.
“I was able to locate the minor in a back bathroom with her face and hands against the wall shaking,” Lt. Zach Rawlins wrote in a sworn statement. “After telling her who I was, the minor thanked me for coming to get her, and said she wanted her momma.”
America is gripped by a panic over Flock’s network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), driven by stories of abusive cops and people wrongly jailed because of what critics call a creeping surveillance state. The outcry has produced angry congressional hearings, hundreds of cancelled contracts, and the physical destruction of hundreds of cameras by vandals who have been cheered on even by some policy professionals. Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation to defund states that don’t ban the cameras; theirs is the third proposal to do so this session.
Largely absent from this discussion are stories like Allie’s, which is not unique: dozens of other children have been returned safely to their parents thanks in part to ALPR technology. As a coalition of ten law enforcement organizations collectively representing thousands of officers put it, “ALPRs help save lives.”
Abductions like Allie’s are rare but not unheard of. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a congressionally chartered nonprofit that helps recover abducted minors, says that last year it received over 100,000 reports of child sex trafficking and assisted in investigating over 32,000 missing children cases. Nonfamily abductions are the least common kind of case, but they can be the hardest to solve, as the obvious suspects are ruled out.
Such abductions are rare, moreover, in part because they prompt an overwhelming response. Federal law requires local departments to report missing children to the Department of Justice within two hours. That information is made available to police nationwide, in large part because, as the Government Accountability Office put it, “[m]issing children who are not found quickly are at an increased risk of victimization.” In a child abduction, every second counts.
In such situations, having an ALPR on the lookout can make the difference—as it did in the recent case of an unnamed 13-year-old girl and her nine-year-old brother who climbed into the back of a car at a Circle K gas station in Moody, Alabama. The driver was Carmelita Arguijo, Moody police allege, a 46-year-old woman who had evidently been grooming the girl online. She also had outstanding federal human trafficking charges.
Arguijo didn’t get far. A 911 caller alerted Moody police to the incident. Within 20 minutes, they had pulled CCTV footage from the gas station, then tracked the car using their Flock system before stopping it on the highway in nearby Bessemer, Alabama. The two children were recovered before police even had time to issue an Amber Alert; Arguijo was held on a $500,000 bond.
“I think if we didn’t have the ALPRs she might have made it all the way back to Texas, never to be seen again,” Moody police chief Reece Smith told me. “God knows what would have happened to them.”
Sometimes ALPRs help solve abductions incident to car thefts—a type of crime they have been shown to help reduce. Take the recent case of an unnamed Richmond, Virginia, mother, whose car was stolen with her sons—one just a month old, the other a three-year-old with autism—in the back seat. “I felt like I just wanted to jump through that phone and help her,” Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards told local news. “She’s screaming, begging us for help, begging. She said, send every police officer you got.”
The woman’s car was quickly caught on one of Richmond’s 99 Flock cameras. Within 45 minutes, the boys had been recovered, and the car thief arrested.
“I think they need to put more Flock cameras out. I think that should be everywhere,” their mother told local news. “What if it was your child that was missing and the only way for someone to locate their car within a reasonable time before anything to happen was cameras that was put around the city that don’t nobody know about?”
There are many more stories like these, just some of which I’ve collected in a database of crimes ALPRs have helped solve or prevent. There’s the Marshall County, Indiana, three-month-old stolen and recovered within two hours; the two girls abducted by a 21-year-old man and rescued in Bulloch County, Georgia; the 11-year-old who was kidnapped and assaulted in Bakersfield, California, whose assailant was picked up by Flock; or the Morgantown, West Virginia, nine-year-old whose uncle drove off with him, and who was rescued in less than 90 minutes.
No confirmable data exist yet on how many children ALPRs have helped recover. But the NCMEC estimates that Flock ALPRs have assisted in the safe return of “more than 1,000 missing persons” since it started working with Flock Safety in 2024. “Technology that provides real-time, actionable information can be the difference between hours and days,” NCMEC Vice President John Bischoff said, describing Flock as “one more way we’re equipping law enforcement with faster, smarter tools to help bring missing children home.”
That’s the reason that police organizations are so alarmed by recent defunding efforts. “When a child is missing, a trafficking victim is being moved across jurisdictions, or a violent offender is on the road, every minute matters,” says a statement by a coalition of such groups, including the Major County Sheriffs of America. “ALPR technology gives investigators a critical lead in seconds—helping law enforcement find someone in danger, identify a dangerous suspect, or connect a vehicle to a serious crime before that opportunity is lost.”
Stories of abducted children, of course, won’t end the debate over Flock. Many people with reasonable concerns about privacy and the risk of abuse will object that a handful of stories—no matter how persuasive—don’t necessarily outweigh their fears.
Their concerns should be addressed by regulation, like the ones I and City Journal contributing editor Rafael Mangual have laid out. Tough rules can help catch abusive cops and protect privacy while also preserving ALPRs as a tool for stopping crime and recovering kids.
What doesn’t make sense is taking the cameras down. Yet that’s the solution proposed by Flock’s most vocal critics, from Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders to Congressman Thomas Massie and even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. All are riding the wave of populist outrage. But tearing down ALPRs is little more than political theater, a gesture that makes people feel safer, without actually offering them the intelligent balance of costs and benefits for which policymakers are responsible.
Following the mob has real consequences. Two months before Allie was taken, someone, probably inspired by the online hysteria, vandalized three of the six Flock cameras in nearby Woodruff, South Carolina. Britten almost certainly drove by one of the downed cameras, Woodruff police chief Gregory Ryan told local news. “That camera would have significantly helped the sheriff’s department in their investigation and hopefully got that young lady back to her family a lot quicker,” he said.
“Had that camera not been damaged,” Sheriff Rhyne said, “we would have solved this and likely had her back safely by midnight.”