Flock Safety’s CEO has gone on record claiming that anybody who is against their surveillance dragnet is attempting to “normalize lawlessness”, but this is an outright lie. The only people that stand to gain from the continued existence of ALPRs aren’t after public safety; they’re after a 1984-style surveillance state, where your every move is monitored, your every word is recorded, and your behavior and patterns can be tracked from coast to coast.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which a city– perhaps even YOUR city– decides that the best way to fight crime is to hire an army of private investigators. These PIs are stationed on every street corner and given specific instructions:

Every car that drives past them– without exception– is to have its driver and passengers photographed, its plate number recorded, and its location and direction recorded as well. This information is then submitted to a giant database that the police can search at any time, which allows them to monitor exactly what everyone in the city is doing at all times just by keeping track of which PI is passed and when.

Now imagine that, instead of deploying a human being that has judgement and empathy and can understand nuance, the police instead deploy a swarm of robots. These cold, unfeeling machines mindlessly perform that same task 24/7– take a picture of every person in the car, write down the plate number, write down the location and the time that the car passed by, and store that information in an easily-searchable database.

Now imagine that, instead of a robot, it’s a camera. It’s powered by AI– the same AI that has infamously told people that doctors recommend eating 2-3 small rocks a day, to use Elmer’s glue and gasoline as pizza toppings, and insists there are 4 ‘r’s are in ‘strawberry’– and not only does it take a photo of your face, your plate number, and mark down where and when this happened, the cameras ALSO read the wifi, bluetooth, and cellular signals from your phone to pinpoint your location in real time as long as you’re within a certain radius of the camera.

All three of these scenarios have already been declared gross violations of your fourth amendment right to privacy. And yet, thanks to a technicality, the police are able to continue this surveillance dragnet with impunity thanks to third party ALPRs.

ALPRs, Automated License Plate Readers, are exactly the third scenario I asked you to imagine. They’re cameras with built in wireless tracking, microphones, and AI. They exist solely to perform indiscriminate surveillance of every single person and vehicle that passes within their field of view, and log all the data required to track those subjects’ movements. You may have heard of Flock cameras, but there are other brands making these as well– Motorola, Axon, Genetec, etc– and they all do the same thing: exploit a loophole in the court decisions regarding the fourth amendment to enforce a surveillance state. After all, it’s perfectly legal for private parties to violate your rights and share the results with the police, who are then free to use that data however they see fit.

These databases are also rife with abuses– per the Institute of Justice, since 2021 there have been two dozen confirmed cases of police officers across the nation, two as close as South Carolina and stretching all the way to California, using ALPR databases to stalk romantic interests. They also don’t have any borders: per the Electronic Frontier Foundation via a public records request, in October 2025 a Texas sheriff’s deputy in Johnson County ran a search for a woman suspected of leaving the state to have an abortion. A single officer, with a single search, attempted to follow somebody through a nationwide network of 83,000 cameras. This is an alarmingly trivial violation of interstate jurisdiction and legal sovereignty, and was done without a warrant and with next to no oversight.

ALPRs are also used to circumvent state-level privacy laws, such as when Flock allowed Customs and Border Protection to access their data from Illinois, despite a law preventing such a warrantless search. Or, in California, the database for San Jose was accessed by law enforcement agencies across the state almost 4 million times between June 5, 2024, and June 17, 2025– 3,965,519 to be precise, again according to the EFF. This is, if you do the math, over ten THOUSAND searches per DAY. Additionally, per public documents obtained by the EFF, there are no regulations regarding access limitation, warrant requirements, or even a need for probable cause. The database can be searched at will, for any or no reason.

Flock Safety’s CEO has gone on record claiming that anybody who is against their surveillance dragnet is attempting to “normalize lawlessness”, but this is an outright lie. The only people that stand to gain from the continued existence of ALPRs aren’t after public safety; they’re after a 1984-style surveillance state, where your every move is monitored, your every word is recorded, and your behavior and patterns can be tracked from coast to coast.

ALPRs are not, and have never been, about decreasing crime. If they were, there would be clear restrictions to their use, just like any other search covered by the fourth amendment: warrant requirements, access restrictions, probable cause mandates, search scope limitations, or any of the other countless protections that law enforcement is subject to for any other kind of search. But these protections don’t exist for ALPRs, in large part because they are, technically, the property of and under the control of a third-party private company.

ALPRs are about one thing, and one thing only: consolidating power for those that have it by making an end-run around the Bill of Rights to establish a surveillance state. There is no other reason to have blanket, 24/7 surveillance of an area with no restrictions on retroactive searches. The cameras don’t discriminate between ‘good’ people and ‘bad’ people, they don’t exercise judgement, they don’t get tired or get distracted or understand nuance. The only thing they do is report every single move you make to every single law enforcement officer that decides they want to look, and all because you were guilty of passing in front of its lens.

The common refrain in support of these systems is that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have to worry about your privacy getting mercilessly stripped from you. My response is this:

Who decides what “wrong” means? Because it’s not you or me.

Contact your representatives today. Let them know how you feel, and demand they put a halt to their ALPR programs immediately. Otherwise, things will only get worse from here.

Find your Rowan County Commissioners and various City and Town officials here: https://rowancountydemocrats.com/contact-your-representatives/local-government-in-rowan-county/

Find your State and National representatives here: https://rowancountydemocrats.com/contact-your-representatives/