Are Privacy Concerns Making Car Burglaries Easier?

Our Take

Invest In Your Culture frames this as a simple trade-off: privacy versus catching car thieves. It's a familiar pitch from Flock Safety and its boosters, but it skips the actual debate. Nobody arguing against blanket license plate surveillance is saying police shouldn't investigate break-ins. The question is whether scanning and storing the movements of every driver, 24/7, for months at a time, is the only way to do it — and whether that kind of permanent dragnet is worth what it costs the rest of us who never commit a crime.

That's the part these "privacy vs. safety" videos always leave out. ALPR networks don't just flag stolen cars and wanted plates; they build a searchable record of where you drive, when, and how often, accessible to hundreds of agencies and, increasingly, to private companies and federal databases nobody voted to let in. A handful of solved burglaries doesn't erase the risk of stalking, data breaches, ICE access, or just the slow normalization of being tracked everywhere you go. Treating privacy as an obstacle to policing, rather than a baseline right, is exactly the framing surveillance companies want the public to accept.

We'll keep documenting where these cameras actually are and how they're used, because that's the information residents need to weigh the claims in videos like this one. Check our map to see what's watching your neighborhood, and visit take action if you want to push back on a system that treats every driver as a suspect by default.