Charles Fain Lehman and Rafael A. Mangual are senior fellows at the Manhattan Institute.
A mother in Richmond, Virginia, experienced every parent’s worst nightmare last month when her car was stolen with her two sons — a 1-month-old and a 3-year-old with autism — in the backseat. In a panic, she called 911. “I felt like I just wanted to jump through that phone and help her,” Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards told local media. His officers promptly plugged the woman’s license plate into the city’s Flock Safety camera system, and in less than an hour, they located the car, recovered the children and arrested the suspect.
“I think they need to put more Flock cameras out. I think they should be everywhere,” the mother told WTVR CBS 6 Richmond. “What if it was your child that was missing and the only way for someone to locate their car within a reasonable time . . . was cameras that was put around the city that don’t nobody know about?”
Those words serve as a powerful counterweight to the furor over Flock, a firm that sells automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, to police departments through a low-priced subscription model. Such high-tech cameras capable of scanning the government-issued car registrations that pass beneath them have drawn the bipartisan ire of politicians across the country. Hundreds of communities, from Mountain View, California, to Arlington, Virginia, have taken them down. Even some governors have restricted their use.
The backlash is an understandable, if misguided, response to a number of concerning cases of police abuse. As The Posthas reported, some officers have used the technology for nefarious purposes, including to “spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes’ new partners or women they wanted to meet.” At the same time, the effort to eradicate the tech is happening despite the objection of dozens of upstanding police leaders, who have emphasized what that Richmond mother saw firsthand: ALPRs save lives.
As we detail in a recent Manhattan Institute report, the technology helps cops do their jobs, from finding hit-and-run suspects to apprehending people wanted in alleged shootings. Legitimate concerns about abuse can be mitigated through intelligent regulation, not by eliminating a long-standing policing tool. Indeed, ALPRs have been in use in the United States for decades. By 2016, at least two-thirds of large police departments were deploying them. That’s because the service they provide — detecting license plates and, with newer ALPRs, vehicle makes, models and colors — is useful.
There’s a large body of evidence to support this. One of us (Lehman) has created a database of more than 1,700 news stories detailing crimes solved or prevented by Flock ALPRs alone. Data isn’t the plural of anecdote, but the developing literature points to cameras generally, and ALPRs specifically, having some crime-reducing benefit.
That is a worthy goal, but any sensible person asks: At what cost? Many critics warn that ALPRs will create an Orwellian surveillance state in which, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) recently put it, we face “mass surveillance of every American” and violations of our “right to privacy.”
We think these concerns are largely misplaced. The constitutional question has been litigated many times, and by our count, every state or federal appellate court that’s ruled on the issue has concluded that ALPR networks are within bounds of the Fourth Amendment. That’s because the technology is nothing like the surveillance techniques that courts have held to implicate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Those illicit techniques include attaching a GPS tracker to a car or using cell-tower data to track a potential offender. Both methods provide granular, near-constant tracking of individuals as they move through public and private spaces. ALPRs, meantime, capture vehicles from fixed points on public roadways, where, as the Supreme Court has said expectations of privacy are greatly diminished.
More important, ALPRs can see only a fraction of the roads in a given jurisdiction. Less than one percent of Houston’s roadways, for example, fell within the sight pictures of the city’s nearly 4,000 ALPRs in June 2024. This makes it impossible for the camera networks to capture anywhere close to enough of residents’ movements to make the systems analogous to the type of surveillance that has triggered the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.
It’s true that much like any police technology, from guns to driver databases, ALPRs come with risks of abuse. Yet states can mitigate those through much less drastic regulation than bans. In our report, we recommend, among other things, the mandatory logging of access to ALPR databases and requiring both individual user and case IDs for system entry. Supervisors ought to have to approve certain queries — such as those by non-investigators that unrelated to crimes they are actively working on — and the system should maintain a 30-day image-retention limit. States, or city and town councils, should mandate regular audits of database access and impose strict criminal penalties for cops who misuse the technology. ALPR use should be limited to serious crimes, not petty traffic enforcement.
Why take these steps? Because while the risk of abuse is real, so too is the risk that, without the help of ALPRs, police wouldn’t have been able to rescue those little boys in Richmond. Smart public policy seeks to balance costs and benefits in a way that makes everyone better off. In addressing the concerns of privacy advocates, we must consider the potential of making crime easier to commit.
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