Can You BLOCK Your License Plate From Red-Light Cameras?

Our Take

Scott Nolan's video is a useful reality check for anyone Googling "how to block a license plate camera" at 11pm after getting a ticket in the mail. His answer, from a working criminal defense lawyer who deals with these cases in court, is basically: don't bother. Covers, sprays, and reflective plate hacks are illegal in most states, easy for officers to spot, and rarely fool modern camera systems anyway. That's worth hearing from someone who isn't selling a plate cover.

But we'd push the framing further. Red-light and speed cameras get talked about as isolated traffic-enforcement tools, when in reality they're part of the same automated surveillance infrastructure as Flock Safety's ALPR network — cameras that log every plate that passes, timestamp it, and store it in a searchable database whether or not you ever ran a red light. The legal question of "can I dodge this ticket" is small potatoes next to the bigger question of who has access to that data, how long it's kept, and whether your daily movements are being quietly cataloged by a private company with no warrant required.

If a video like this gets you thinking about the cameras on your commute, take it a step further: check our camera map to see what's actually watching your routes, and browse our take-action page for ways to push back on ALPR expansion in your town — because the fight isn't about beating one ticket, it's about who controls the record of everywhere you drive.