Bob Duff Calls for Pause on CT License Plate Cameras, Citing Privacy Concerns | The Lisa Wexler Show

Our Take

When a sitting Senate Majority Leader goes on a local radio show and says "slow down" on license plate cameras, that's newsworthy. Most elected officials either champion ALPRs as a crime-fighting silver bullet or stay quiet and let police departments and Flock Safety sales reps do the talking. Bob Duff putting his name on a pause request, even a modest one, is the kind of political cover that privacy advocates in other states have been waiting for.

Credit to Lisa Wexler for giving a state lawmaker room to actually explain his reasoning instead of reducing it to a soundbite. The core problem Duff is circling is the one we keep hammering on: these systems get bought and deployed town by town, often with zero public hearing, zero data retention limits written into law, and zero accounting for how many agencies end up pulling from the same shared network. A 'pause' isn't anti-police, it's just asking for the guardrails that should've existed before the cameras went up.

Connecticut residents who want to see how many of these cameras are already running in their own towns should check our camera map, and anyone who wants to push their own city council or state rep toward real oversight can find concrete steps at take action. One senator asking questions is a start, not a finish line.