Inside ALPR Technology: Smarter Policing, Stronger Accountability

Our Take

PORAC's "On the Job" sat down with Flock Safety's Chief Legal Officer, Dan Haley, alongside a retired San Diego police captain, to reassure Californians that ALPR cameras are just another tool for solving crimes and recovering stolen cars. Notice who's missing from that table: no privacy attorneys, no civil liberties groups, no residents who've had their plates flagged by mistake. When the company selling the cameras and the union representing the officers deploying them are the only voices framing the debate, "balance" is doing a lot of work in that title.

None of this is new — every rollout of mass surveillance tech comes wrapped in the same script: staffing shortages, missing persons, stolen vehicles, investigative leads. Those use cases are real, but they're also the easy 20% of the story. The harder 80% — how long the data sits in Flock's servers, who else can query it, whether ICE or out-of-state agencies get access through shared networks, and what happens when a misread plate sends officers to the wrong car with guns drawn — doesn't get airtime in a friendly union podcast produced with the vendor's own general counsel.

California lawmakers are actively wrestling with restrictions on this technology precisely because the current guardrails are thin and enforcement is spotty. If you want the other side of this conversation, check our camera map to see how dense the ALPR network already is near you, and visit our take-action page for ways to push back before your local council signs another no-bid Flock contract.