Wait, The OPP are using Automatic License Plate Readers? 32 Tickets in 22 minutes?!
The short version: A viral OPP tweet bragging about 32 tickets in 22 minutes shows how ALPR 'wins' get sold to the public while mass scanning of innocent drivers goes unmentioned.
Our Take
Credit to Minimum Wage Politics for digging into this one. The Ontario Provincial Police tweeted out a stat clearly meant to impress: 32 tickets in 22 minutes, all thanks to automatic license plate readers. It's the same PR playbook we see from Flock Safety and police departments across the US — lead with the flashy enforcement number, skip the part where the system had to scan thousands of innocent plates to find those violations.
That's the trick with ALPR marketing everywhere, not just Ontario. Every car that rolls past one of these cameras gets logged, timestamped, and geotagged, whether or not the driver did anything wrong. The 32 people who got tickets are the visible tip of a much bigger iceberg of surveillance data being vacuumed up on everyone else. When agencies celebrate the tickets, they're quietly normalizing the dragnet that made those tickets possible.
This is exactly why we track where these cameras are showing up in the first place — because 'it caught some bad guys' is never the whole story. Check our camera map to see what's already watching in your area, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR rollout near you.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Minimum Wage Politics, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.