When "Investment" Means More Surveillance: ALPRs in Poor Communities

Our Take

Credit to the Chicago Justice Project for pulling this thread. In the clip, Professor Steven Keener of Christopher Newport University walks through findings from his paper, "Surveillance Inequality: Race, Poverty, and the Geography of Automated License Plate Reader Deployment," and the core finding should surprise no one who's been tracking Flock's expansion: lower-income communities end up carrying a heavier surveillance load, often sold to them as a civic upgrade rather than what it actually is.

That framing trick — calling a camera network an "investment" — is doing a lot of work. Investment implies something given to a community for its benefit. But an ALPR doesn't pave a road or fund a school; it logs every vehicle that passes, builds a searchable movement history, and hands that data to police and, in Flock's case, often to other agencies far outside the neighborhood. When that infrastructure gets concentrated in poorer areas, the people with the least power to push back end up most exposed to a system that treats their daily movements as data points of suspicion.

This is exactly why we track deployments on our camera map — because you can't have a real conversation about equity in policing until you know where the cameras actually are. If this pattern sounds familiar in your town, check the map and see what's nearby, then head to our take-action page for ways to push your local council to ask who benefits and who's being watched.