2 Mass. police officers on leave after city's license plate reader system audit

Our Take

Credit to WCVB Channel 5 Boston for actually following up on what an audit found instead of letting it gather dust in a file cabinet somewhere. Two Lynn officers now sitting on paid leave over a 'concerning pattern' of ALPR searches is exactly the kind of story that should be happening in every city running this tech, because it almost never does. Departments love to tell the public these systems have guardrails. An audit flagging misuse is proof the guardrails only matter if someone's actually checking.

Here's the part that should bug you: audits like this are the exception, not the rule. Most Flock and ALPR deployments across the country run with minimal oversight, vague retention policies, and search logs that either don't exist or never get reviewed unless a lawsuit or a nosy reporter forces the issue. When a system logs every plate that passes a camera and lets officers query it at will, 'concerning patterns' aren't a bug, they're the predictable outcome of handing out that kind of power with no accountability built in.

If you want to know whether your own city has these cameras watching you, and whether anyone's bothering to audit how they're used, start with our camera map. And if your local department hasn't published an audit policy, that silence is itself the story.