Safeguarding Your Movements From Mass Surveillance. 

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STATS

Facts About Automatic License Plate Readers

These metrics reflect the pervasive, ever growing nature of surveillance technology.

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6000+

Cities use ALPRs

2,000

Plates scanned per minute

1000s

Of vehicles tracked per city

What Are Automatic License Plate Reader Cameras?

Throughout the country, local governments are partnering with private companies—like Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions, PlateSmart, and others—to install automatic license plate reader cameras on their roadways. Unlike red-light cameras or speed cameras, which are triggered by specific violations, ALPRs photograph vehicles as they drive by. As the president of one of these ALPR companies explained in sworn testimony, these cameras can detect any license plate that comes into the camera’s field, snap a photo, and upload the image within seconds along with precise geolocation data1. The server uses artificial intelligence to extract and store data about each car. As reported by the ACLU, these technologies enable police to access these databases without a warrant, track vehicles, and effortlessly share information with other departments throughout the country. And the capabilities of these technologies are only expanding with video-integration, people look-up tools, and facial recognition implementation.  

Street security cameras mounted on a pole in an urban environment, highlighting surveillance.
Silhouette of surveillance cameras and streetlights against a beautiful sunset sky.
CCTV camera overlooking a busy street with cars in motion, capturing urban surveillance.
facts

How Automatic License Plate Reader Cameras Work

Facts to help our fight against surveillance.

Versatility
These ALPR cameras can be mounted on street poles, traffic lights, or overpasses, and are often seen under solar panels, which can be used to power the cameras.

However, they can also be deployed in mobile ways, such as being affixed to police cars. 

Pervasiveness
ALPRs scan each license plate that goes by, and as reported by the Independent Institute, can scan up to 2,000 plates per minute, essentially guaranteeing every vehicle is captured.

Reports in New York, Connecticut, North Carolina, and elsewhere, found that cities with license plate readers often capture information on thousands of different vehicles each month.  

A solar-powered outdoor surveillance camera mounted on a pole, capturing clear day images.
Storage
Different departments have different rules for how long they store the data after they’re uploaded to servers, ranging from weeks to years, according to research from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center.

Some states have enacted laws related to retention policies. And the major companies in this space often defer to local officials to set retention policies, with one company setting the standard retention policy at 30 days. That said, some departments opt for longer retention windows. For example, San Jose Police retain data collected from their ALPR cameras for 365 days. Regardless of the storage duration, as reported by the Policing Project at New York University, officials can  download data on a rolling basis before the retention period expires, allowing them to “avoid the transparency and auditing features built into” ALPR systems.  

Close-up of a police car's flashing blue lights in an urban environment.
Search
Once artificial intelligence is used to create a vehicle profile, police can log in to their account and search for any plate and see every location that particular vehicle has been spotted within the timeframe.

Reports have shown that police from Connecticut to Florida to Kansas have been caught using the cameras to stalk innocent people, including ex-girlfriends. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that in a majority of instances, Houston Police don’t provide a specific reason for why they are searching for a specific plate in the database.  

What we do

We fight Back.

As part of our Project on the Fourth Amendment, the Institute for Justice (IJ) is challenging the government’s arbitrary power to use ALPRs to surveil the entire driving public in court, helping activists push back against the deployment of license plate readers, working with legislators on model bills to protect Fourth Amendment rights, and shedding light on the issue through the media.  
Our attorneys are experts on the Fourth Amendment and on how citizens can use it to fight back against government abuse of automatic license plate reader cameras. 

View Project on the Fourth Amendment Join Our Activists

We Sue.

In October 2024, we filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of license plate readers in Norfolk, Virginia. At the time of the lawsuit, the city of Norfolk had a system of 172 cameras tracking drivers on its streets. The city’s own police chief has said, “it would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” 
Our clients are two area residents who don’t want the government tracking where they go, especially since they haven’t done anything wrong.  
The city attempted to have our lawsuit dismissed, but the court ruled our case can move forward. Flock Safety then tried to intervene in the case to defend its ability to sell products that prey on people’s Fourth Amendment rights, but the court rejected that effort. 

Learn more about the case

We Educate the Public.

Since the launch of our lawsuit against Norfolk, IJ’s experts on license plate readers have been quoted in newspaper articles, television segments, radio interviews, online articles and YouTube videos throughout the country.  
 
Our attorneys have worked with reporters who have shown that federal agencies have accessed local databases, that police have not provided legitimate reasons before searching these databases, and that these technologies are expanding.

Read Article

Get Involved With the Plate Privacy Project

While IJ cannot sue every city that uses automatic license plate readers, you can still get involved in the fight against license plate readers in three main ways:  

Sign Up

You can sign up to join our nationwide group of activists who are fighting back against this dragnet surveillance. 

Speak Up

You can speak at a local government meeting about your concerns with these cameras. If your town, city or county already has these cameras, we suggest you reach out to local officials to learn when the contract renewal date is and, when that date comes close, to speak out against renewing the contract. If your city does not yet have these cameras, you can monitor local media to see if officials are considering a contract, and if they are, you can speak out. 

Stand Up

You can also reach out to officials who represent you in state government to encourage them to adopt legislation that protects your Fourth Amendment rights from this kind of mass surveillance. More information on that can be found in the “model bill” section below.  

Legislation

Model Bill

Our legislative team has put together a model bill to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of all drivers, and to push back against local governments’ expansive use of license plate reader technology. 

You can read the bill and learn more about it here:

Read Model Bill
privacy alert

Sensitive Locations

We’ve also conducted our own internal research to find license plate reader cameras near sensitive locations where people’s privacy concerns are most acute.   

The research shows cameras located near an abortion clinic, a halfway house, an immigration attorney’s office, a church, a gun range, and a mosque, among other locations. Using the open-source map, DeFlock, we cross-referenced the locations of cameras with Google Maps.   

These locations are even more concerning when one considers that police have used these cameras for immigration enforcement and to search for a woman who left the state of Texas for an abortion, and that federal agents persuaded local police to use these cameras to gather information on everyone who attended certain gun shows in Southern California, as reported by news outlets such as the Associated Press, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and others.

Additional Resources and Maps

Concerned citizens have shared the locations of some of these cameras through an open-source website called DeFlock, which has created a map of locations. You can see that map below. 

This map is just a microcosm of the vast web of license plate reader cameras that have been installed on streets throughout the nation. According to 404 Media, one of the main license plate reader providers, Flock Safety, was so upset that its surveillance cameras were being made public that they attempted to shut the website down.  

Number of LPR and Other Cameras Map

Data sources: Flock Safety & The News & Observer

Vehicles Detected By Agency Map

Data source: The News & Observer

Searches Conducted By Agency Map

Data source: The News & Observer

Hotlist Hits By Agency Map

Data source: The News & Observer

Agency Search Aggressiveness Map

Data source: The News & Observer

DeFlock.me Camera Map

Map Source: deflock.me

Report a Camera

If you report a camera to us, we can help ensure it ends up on DeFlock’s map, to help raise awareness of this issue.

Report Camera now

Automated Plate Reader News

Sign Up To Join Our Activists

Throughout the country, police are partnering with private companies to install automatic license plate reader cameras, which make a record of every vehicle that drives by. These cameras upload the photos to a server where artificial intelligence maps out everywhere a vehicle has been seen, spots patterns in its movements, and can even predict where it could go in the future. Some cities are essentially blanketed by these cameras, making it nearly impossible to drive anywhere without being watched.

Police can access this database without a warrant and can share information with other government agencies across the country. These cameras are ripe for abuse, and police have been caught using them for unintended purposes, such as stalking ex-girlfriends.

Once again, all of this can be done without a warrant or any serious oversight.

Thankfully, people are starting to push back against this dragnet surveillance. Citizens throughout the nation have spoken out against the use of these cameras in their cities, and some municipalities have paused or stopped the deployment of the cameras.

Sign up to join our activists in the fight against this warrantless mass surveillance.