Pro-ALPR arguments usually center on their usefulness for solving crimes that have happened. Police and Flock officials like to talk about abductions and missing persons, and more commonly, the tech is used to solve car theft cases. The data about how much ALPRs help, on what crimes, and how much is extremely poor (and I have a lot to say about that in future newsletters) but, for now, let’s say it is useful for police to know when a license plate of a stolen car drives past a camera.

Right now, every car that drives past a camera has its license plate recorded with the time and location. That is stored and police can search through it if a crime occurs. Billions of data points are collected every month about innocent people that will never be of use for solving these crimes.

An alternative approach would be to store no data at all. In this scenario, if my car is stolen, I report it to the police, they put an alert for it into the ALPR system, and the ALPR alerts the police if that plate drives past. No data is recorded except for the license plates that are part of an active investigation. Even if we wanted to allow the more dubious searches for a vehicle type (e.g. “a red SUV with a roof rack”), the cameras could do that recognition and only report matches in real time rather than storing all that information on vehicles that will never match a search.

This uses a well-known principle of data governance called data minimization. Under data minimization, (1) the minimum amount of data is collected for the system’s purpose, (2) it is only used for that purpose (never anything else), and (3) it is stored for the minimum amount of time.

This is good governance for several reasons. First, it is more secure. It reduces the impact of data breaches; if a hacker gets in, there is less for them to steal and thus less damage that can be done. It also means that your security budget per data point is higher, so the data you do store is better protected. Second, data minimization reduces the opportunity for abuse because there is less data there to be abused. A cop cannot stalk his ex with an ALPR if that ALPR is not recording her movements in the first place. Third, it is cheaper. Storing, managing, and computing with data is expensive. If you only store the data you need, all those costs decline.

Given this, why would Flock or another ALPR system choose to store all that data? Why would they raise their costs, make their systems less secure, and wildly increase the opportunities for abuse? We don’t have an honest answer.

They would argue, I’m sure, that we may want data on a vehicle’s movements before a crime is reported. But how often are those searches conducted and how often are they useful for actually solving a crime? It is telling that nearly all of the examples we have heard from police and from Flock are cases where the data minimization approach would be just as effective. We need hard data about how these systems are used and when they are effective to assess if there is a legitimate argument for wider surveillance. But we don’t have that data. It would be straightforward for Flock or a police department to partner with academics (like me!) to do this analysis, so it is telling that it hasn’t been done (or it has been done and the results have not been reported).

Also, Flock’s statements about how their system is abused are either dishonest or incompetent (I vote for dishonest). Data minimization is a concept that has been around since the 1980s, and reducing data misuse is one of its core motivations. Yet when asked about the dozens of cases of law enforcement officers using Flock to stalk their exes, Flock CEO Garret Langley basically shrugged and declared that abuse is inevitable: “We’re not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions.” When I was on a panel with Flock Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas at the City Club of Cleveland in July, he was asked about the abuse and his somewhat sarcastic response was “So your ask is, is there anything we can do from Flock’s point of view to stop bad people from doing bad things?”

Yes! That is the ask. And Yes! There are totally things Flock could be doing about it. Data minimization would drastically reduce the abuse that can happen with these cameras. Flock officials acting like they are unaware of data minimization as a solution is either dishonest or disqualifyingly incompetent.

The data maximizing approach is costing ALPR companies a huge amount of money to store billions of photos and data points every month. The systems are regularly being abused because of it. There are clear technological alternatives that support the main types of searches they and police use in their arguments to justify the technology. So why do they continue on the data maximal path?

We don’t know.

If there were data - not just an occasional anecdote but real, solid data - that showed that searching through history, rather than searching in real time for a car, was a frequent and important use of ALPR data, we would have been told. The fact that we hear nothing but anecdotes and hypotheticals means that this data does not exist. Thus, Flock and other ALPR companies must have other reasons that justify the added expense, lowered security, and increased abuse.

I can think of reasons, and they all skew authoritarian. The historical data could be used to retrieve a list of people who participated in a legal activity that someone in power has decided they don’t like (attending a protest, going to a gun range, going to a legal dispensary). As a data scientist, I can certainly see applications for future “features”. The data could be analyzed to build patterns of movement, to predict who is going to do what in when, to flag when a person is behaving in a “suspicious” way. It could be used to alert police that someone might do something wrong in the future.

There are still concerns about the alternative, data minimizing surveillance systems I describe. But we deserve to know why Flock, ALPR companies, and police are intentionally designing systems that violate data minimization principles. There is a reason and, whatever it is, they are not telling us.

Welcome new readers and greetings from Atlanta where Flock is hosting the Flock Forward conference and protesters are responding:

When arguing for the removal of ALPRs and other invasive surveillance, I think it is important to, in good faith, rebut the arguments that police make in favor of them. In this newsletter, I’m going to be sharing some of the rebuttals that I write in the hope that the sources and arguments may be useful to you, dear readers, in your own fights.

Join me in crafting this rebuttal to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office post on Facebook:

Why do we support the use of license plate readers? Because they make our community safer.

Beginning here, the question is what we mean by “safer”. The police may mean a reduction in certain crimes, but many of us do not feel safer having the police track our movements. The act of surveillance itself is harmful. Introducing a violative technology to reduce other crime does not mean the community is safer as a whole. It just means one type of harm may go down (and that is debatable).

Over the past two years, LPRs have proven to be an incredibly effective tool in helping solve crimes, locate missing people, and save lives. Since 2024, they’ve helped solved 15 murders, 17 kidnappings, 6 forcible sex offenses, nearly 100 shootings, and 172 missing-persons cases.

1. “Help” is doing a lot of work here. Would these crimes have been solvable without the cameras? If so, the cameras don’t really deserve credit for this. The value of these cameras is inflated by giving them full credit for solving crimes that might have been solved without them.

2. Numbers like this are often presented as though there is no cost on the other end. But there is a huge cost we pay for that “help”:

   1. Flock says they record billions of license plates every month. This means hundreds of billions, maybe over a trillion, of recorded movements since 2024. Is that level of state surveillance and the freedom of movement and association we give up with it worth the trade?

   2. How many abuses of the technology have happened in that time? How many police have tracked someone they shouldn’t? How many people have been monitored because they legally attended a protest or went to a gun range or visited a medical clinic?

   3. How many errors have led to bad police encounters in that time? Flock reports having around a 7% error rate. How many people were flagged as driving stolen vehicles or participating in a crime because of those errors? How many of us are at risk? People have gone to jail because Flock made a mistake. Those risks are real and need to be factored in.

We’ve seen that impact firsthand. An LPR recently helped us locate a teenage girl who was kidnapped from her home in Georgia and brought to a Jacksonville motel, where we were able to get her to safety.

An LPR also helped us quickly locate an elderly man with dementia.

And after one of our corrections officers was tragically killed at a truck stop in October 2024, an LPR helped investigators locate the suspects, who were in custody within 48 hours.

When someone you love is in danger, you want us to have every responsible tool available to help find them and solve the crime. We currently have 141 fixed LPRs and 9 mobile LPRs across Duval County.

Anecdotes like this are designed to make an issue emotional. They are designed to put any opponents of the technology on the defensive, allowing the proponents of the surveillance to say “Why do you want killers to go free and kidnappers to get away with it and missing people to remain missing???” It is a bad faith argument because anecdotes are not evidence.

FBI data shows that, in Atlanta at least, crime clearance rates have not meaningfully decreased despite a robust surveillance infrastructure.

Also, there are lots of people who, even being in a terrible situation, would not want the entire country stripped of their constitutional rights to give police a tool to search for a perpetrator. If we care about reducing crime, there is a lot of evidence-based research out there on ways to do that, which focus on reducing the chance that the crimes are committed in the first place. There are many other solutions to consider besides introducing surveillance to solve the problems after they occur.

We also understand that LPRs can raise questions and concerns. That’s why their use is tied to legitimate law-enforcement purposes, monitored, and audited. If someone misuses the system, we will address it.

Our goal is to use technology responsibly to help keep our community safe while maintaining accountability and trust.

Every surveillance system ends up being abused. Creating a system that allows the abuse to happen and then addressing it later is a flawed approach. We all want to live in a society where we can move freely, without unreasonable monitoring, in part because we want to be free from the opportunity that the government abuses that data.

These systems reduce our freedom. They create a police surveillance state. We want safe communities, but we surrender our safety when we are surveilled. There are ways to reduce crime without asking us to surrender our rights. We can do better.

More data, arguments, and anti-surveillance news is on the way. In the meantime, here are a few more pictures from the protests at the Flock Forward conference last night.

Substack is going to ask you to pay for this newsletter, but please don’t! Writing this is my job and I don’t need extra money for doing it 💛

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To kick off, here’s a reminder that this week is the National Week of Action against ALPRs. You can find information about protests, teach-ins, and other anti-surveillance activism in your communities here:

https://noalprs.com/

I’m also joining a webinar tonight put on by Red Wine & Blue where we will talk about Flock Cameras, what they are, and how you can talk to your local government to lobby against them. Register here (it’s free!)

For those of you who haven’t met me, I’m a computer scientist, AI ethicist, and Professor at the University of Maryland. Maybe check out my most recent TED talk about Data Colonialism to learn more about some of the things I care about!

If you care about the far-right, I also write a newsletter called the MAGAReport that looks at one very extreme community of Trump supporters to help us understand what they may be planning (or not).