ALPR Update: 2 States take on Flock, Axon, and others

Our Take

Credit where it's due: "Dad, the engineer" built a scoreboard, and scoreboards are how you prove a trend is real instead of wishful thinking. Skeptics love to say awareness campaigns are just noise, that nobody in a statehouse cares what a bunch of people on YouTube or Reddit think about license plate readers. Two states apparently moving to check Flock, Axon, and the rest of the ALPR industry is a data point against that cynicism, even if it's early innings.

This matters because the surveillance industry's whole business model depends on moving faster than scrutiny — get the cameras installed, normalize the data-sharing agreements, and let "public safety" branding do the rest before anyone asks who's watching the watchers. When legislators start drafting guardrails, that's a sign the awareness-to-pressure pipeline this creator is defending actually works, slowly and unevenly, state by state.

We'd rather see fifty states on that scoreboard than two, and that only happens if more people know a camera is on their corner in the first place. Check our map to see what's been logged near you, and if you want to turn awareness into the kind of pressure that shows up in a bill, our take-action page has concrete next steps.