The furor over Flock—the police tech firm that primarily sells automatic license plate readers (ALPRs)—is a bipartisan affair. It is unsurprising that the Left is upset. The ACLU, for example, has attacked Flock’s business model, claiming the firm “seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits.” It is more surprising to see strong opposition on the Right, with many rallying behind proposals like Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie’s bill to withhold federal funds from any municipality or police department using ALPRs.
This horseshoe alliance, however, could create room for a countervailing left-right pro-Flock consensus. This coalition would focus on the potential for ALPRs to accomplish objectives desired by both sides: reducing crime and restoring public order, on the one hand; fewer traffic stops and less coercive law enforcement, on the other.
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These two objectives are not contradictory. As public policy scholar Mark Kleiman argued in When Brute Force Fails, increased certainty of enforcement can create a less harsh system overall. Instead of focusing on aggressively punishing the few lawbreakers we can catch, we could instead apprehend more offenders and impose lighter sentences.
ALPRs help catch wrongdoers. A working paper by Scott Mourtgos and Ian Adams studying deployment of Flock’s fixed ALPRs across 216 U.S. law-enforcement agencies found that deployment was associated with an 11 percent reduction in motor vehicle theft. Even criminals acknowledge that the technology will reduce car thefts and drive-by shootings.
ALPRs like Flock’s do this without massive increases in officers or police stops and searches. In that sense, the technology increases the welfare of ordinary citizens against the 1 percent of antisocial offenders.
This is possible because cameras make detection of crimes faster and more reliable. With more reliable enforcement, punishments can be milder, since criminals will be deterred by the greater probability that they will be caught. Research on DNA databases demonstrates this: the use of these tools increases profiled offenders’ risk of apprehension, and they commit fewer crimes.
Accepting automation in policing in exchange for a greater probability of catching criminals should appeal to the center-Right because it offers more order without asking taxpayers to fund a police-hiring surge. Automation should also appeal to the center-Left because it lowers the enforcement burden on low-income and minority communities. Certainty of punishment substitutes for severity, which means fewer people going to jail for low-level property crimes and fewer of the pretextual stops that arouse progressive concerns about disparate impact. Automated surveillance technologies also reduce the risk of discrimination. ALPRs don’t flag vehicles based on an officer’s instinct; they identify vehicles directly tied to crimes.
To understand the power of deterrence, look to Europe, which has a murder rate roughly one-third lower than that of the United States but far fewer people in prison per capita. This result owes in part to Europe having more police per resident, thanks to higher population density and state capacity. More police means greater risk of apprehension, which in turn deters more criminals.
The United States could try to mirror this density, but raising the number of police per resident poses political and practical challenges. The U.S. population is much more geographically dispersed, and its police forces are much more decentralized institutionally. For example, France and Italy have anywhere from one to three police forces, depending on the definition. The United States has 17,500, including city police departments, county sheriff’s offices, state troopers, and federal law enforcement agencies.
Technologies like ALPRs can help make up for America’s more limited policing capacity. American police departments are short-staffed. A nationwide survey found agencies operating at just 91 percent of authorized strength, with over 70 percent of departments saying recruiting has become tougher over the past five years. Cameras will help police do more with less.
Many ALPR critics on both sides see police automation as a threat to American civil liberties. But Americans can establish practices and procedures to minimize the abuse of cameras and to ensure that they will not be used to violate our freedoms. If ALPR critics on the Right want more policing with less government intrusion, they should push for stronger rules governing the use and capture of camera data, especially limits on data retention. If critics on the Left want to reduce the “wrong” kind of policing, they should support the push for better targeted policing, not eliminate it altogether.