Proponents claim public safety boons
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, are widespread across our broadcast region and the nation. Harrisonburg is the latest local city to face pressure from grassroots groups to remove the technology from public streets. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports in the first installment of a two-part series.
Law enforcement agencies have used ALPR technology for more than two decades. But as these cameras proliferate across the landscape, the artificial intelligence becomes more refined, and newer companies such as Flock Safety repeatedly end up in the news, the tide of public opinion has turned against the technology in some places. The cities of Staunton and Charlottesville ended their contracts with Flock late last year. An online petition to do the same in Harrisonburg now has more than 1,100 signatures. In other jurisdictions across the region, the cameras have been quietly embraced.
The Shenandoah County Sheriff's Office uses Axon-brand ALPRs mounted to deputies' vehicles, as well as Flock cameras stationed in Edinburg, Toms Brook, and Woodstock. The town governments of Woodstock, Strasburg, Mount Jackson, and New Market have each installed their own ALPRs, too.
TIM CARTER: I can see why people would take the position that they're uncomfortable with it or they don't like the technology, but the technology is there and the technology is useful.
Sheriff Tim Carter explained that the ALPRs take images of vehicles and their license plates as they pass by, attempt to read the license plate number, and then cross-check that with state and national crime databases. For example, if a car was reported stolen, the sheriff's office's camera system would alert deputies if it 'sees' that license plate.
CARTER: The officer would then contact our emergency communications center. They then verify that the vehicle's still stolen.
Holly Beilin, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, explained that officers can also search the database for complete or partial license plate numbers or by "vehicle fingerprint," a.k.a., the make, model, and color of car, and aftermarket features such as a roof rack.
HOLLY BEILIN: So let's say a crime like a hit and run occurs. Officers are able to search the system for particular license plates or vehicle characteristics within a certain time frame and use that to develop a case.
According to a map of citizen-reported cameras maintained by Deflock.org, there are at least 124 cameras across WMRA's broadcast region – in Winchester, Harrisonburg, Lexington, Culpeper, Farmville, and the counties of Frederick, Shenandoah, Page, Rockingham, Augusta, Nelson, and Albemarle. Many monitor the primary routes of ingress and egress around towns. A handful of these are stationed in the parking lots of Lowe’s Home Improvement stores.
Carter said his agency has primarily used the technology to locate people reported missing.
CARTER: We've had, I can think of one right off the top of my head of a senior citizen who was reported from his family that he was in medical distress, and we were trying to use that system to try to locate him or at least where he had been. … When we're dealing with a potential abduction, or a missing child, or a missing person, some of these things … are very time-sensitive.
MICHAEL PARKS: We have recovered more than a dozen missing persons, identified where they were, able to connect with them, return them safely to their families, because of these cameras picking up a vehicle that maybe that individual was last seen in or last associated with.
Michael Parks is the director of communications and public engagement for the city of Harrisonburg.
PARKS: I believe it's nearly 50 stolen vehicles we've identified, some just within an hour or two of that vehicle being stolen. … The cameras have also helped us identify suspects in homicides from other communities who have happened to come to Harrisonburg. It's let us know about individuals who are wanted for theft rings in other communities.
Critiques of the technology range from concerns about an invasion of constitutionally-protected privacy to various ways the collected data could be inappropriately accessed or used by bad actors, local law enforcement, or federal agencies, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders cited some of these concerns in a city council meeting in December.
SAM SANDERS: Because of ongoing concerns for protection of data, potential misuse by outside forces, and an inability to guarantee our local parameters will protect information from being used outside of how the local law enforcement personnel were using this system, council has requested that we not move forward with this system.
However, he said the council would discuss other providers of ALPR technology in an upcoming work session.
Several Staunton citizens spoke out at a council meeting before city officials decided to end their Flock contract.
DEBORAH KUSHNER: We have been warned we are on the slippery slope into … authoritarianism. We are there.
LISA ADAMS: Nobody wants to live within a surveillance state, and Staunton is not the place for that.
FIONA SUMMERS: Council cannot ensure where this data goes despite any contractual agreements you might have with Flock as an organization.
In the second half of this story, we'll delve deeper into critiques of and controversies around the technology.
Detractors claim cybersecurity risks, incursions into civil liberties
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, are widespread across our broadcast region and the nation. Harrisonburg is the latest local city to face pressure from grassroots groups to remove the technology from public streets. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports in the conclusion of a two-part series.
Reporting by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO last September revealed that data from the five Flock-brand ALPR cameras in Bridgewater had been accessed by outside law enforcement 6.9 million times over 12 months, including thousands of searches by police departments and sheriff's offices for the stated reason of immigration enforcement.
That was before a new state law went into effect last July, which limits the use of this data to Virginia law enforcement agencies investigating an alleged criminal violation of state or local code, a missing or endangered person, human trafficking, and stolen vehicles and license plates. It requires the data to be deleted after 21 days. It also stopped this data from being released to journalists and the public via the Freedom of Information Act.
TIM CARTER: I'm very in tune with people's privacy, and their concerns about that.
Shenandoah County Sheriff Tim Carter's agency uses vehicle-mounted, stationary, and mobile trailer ALPRs.
CARTER: We're usin g this technology to provide enhanced public safety in Shenandoah County, and if we misuse this technology, there are criminal ramifications for that.
The Harrisonburg Police Department's ALPR policy dictates that the administrative bureau commander is tasked with conducting an audit of their systems every 30 days to ensure compliance. The city's director of communications and public engagement, Michael Parks, said the department is intentional about who is granted access to the data, and how they're trained.
MICHAEL PARKS: We know that the community puts a lot of faith in us and a lot of trust in us, and we are jealous of that faith and trust, and we don't want to do anything to risk it.
U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis ruled in January that Norfolk's use of ALPRs did not invade plaintiffs' privacy, and wrote that federal and state courts have consistently agreed that using this technology on a public roadway does not constitute a warrantless search. However, he cautioned that "as the number and capabilities of ALPR cameras expand, the constitutional balancing could conceivably tip the other way."
NOAH ETKA: This doesn't have to be an issue of whether or not you support police, or whether or not you support public safety. It really comes down to the creation of an all-powerful dataset that allows the patterns of people's intricate daily lives to be analyzed and scrutinized.
Noah Etka is one of the Harrisonburg residents campaigning against Flock cameras. The city pays $85,000 a year for the use of 31 cameras. They also have a contract with Axon for car-mounted ALPRs. Another city resident, Stan Bottcher, expressed concerns about Flock allowing improper access to the data.
STAN BOTTCHER: That data, while it's collected locally, is still going away to an ether where HPD is relying on Flock to have everything configured correctly and do the right thing with it, which time and time again we've seen demonstrated to not be the case.
Police in Mountain View, California severed ties with Flock after an audit revealed that federal agencies had accessed their data during a brief period in 2024, which the department says it did not permit. I asked Holly Beilin, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, about this.
HOLLY BEILIN: Any of the incidents that you're talking about occurred prior to Flock, at the beginning and middle of last year, putting very specific compliance mechanisms into our platform … offering a lot more specificity and granularity into agencies understanding their sharing settings. So now, when agencies in states that forbid or prohibit any out-of-state sharing implement Flock, out-of-state discoverability is actually fully blocked.
She said that's now been instituted in Virginia and California Flock systems.
The company made changes following another controversy last year, too. A sheriff's deputy from Texas searched for a woman's license plate all over the country with the description "had an abortion, search for female," as the Tri-City Herald reported. Her ex-boyfriend told authorities that she had self-administered a medication abortion and left, and deputies began a death investigation. Texas bans nearly all abortions. However, what the man claimed was an 18-week-old fetus turned out to be a blood clot. Police shifted to investigating him for domestic violence. The woman was found safe, given no criminal charges, and the ex-boyfriend has since been indicted on multiple assault charges.
This abortion-related search contributed to at least one Washington city's decision to shut off their cameras, and an investigation by the Illinois Secretary of State into this and other illegal searches of Flock data within their state.
BEILIN: It is fair to say that the search reason in that case caused consternation, and so what Flock also did last year is we instituted more granularity around search reasons within the platform. And so what that looks like today is that it's required, when law enforcement are performing a search, to add a search reason that comes from a drop-down menu. … They're based on NIBRS crime codes … so, think homicide, larceny, assault.
NIBRS stands for the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Beilin said Flock data is collected, transmitted to the cloud, and stored with encryption that meets standards set by the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Systems. Bottcher, for one, is not convinced of its security.
BOTTCHER: It's a bit of a Pandora's box situation where the technology appears to be a gift to some, but we need to be aware of the long-term implications of what that's going to mean for our futures and our communities with the scope of surveillance nationally.
Where ALPR technology hangs on the scales balancing security and liberty is an assessment that, currently, falls to each local community to make.
