Why Should We Be Concerned About Automated License Plate Readers?
The short version: Chicago Justice Project asks the right question: why should ALPRs worry us—and the answer is mass, warrantless tracking of everyone's movements.
Our Take
The Chicago Justice Project is asking a question we think every city council, alderman, and driver should sit with: why should automated license plate readers concern us at all if they're just "fighting crime"? Credit to their team for framing ALPRs not as a single gadget but as infrastructure — because that's exactly what it is. One camera on one street corner is a curiosity. Thousands of them networked together, sharing data across jurisdictions, is a surveillance system that tracks where you go, when, and how often, whether or not you've ever been suspected of a crime.
That's the part that gets lost in the sales pitch. Flock Safety and similar vendors market these systems as passive tools for solving specific crimes, but the underlying database doesn't forget. It builds a retrievable history of movement for every plate that passes, stored, searched, and in many cases shared well beyond the town that installed the camera. Once that infrastructure exists, the guardrails depend entirely on policy, retention limits, and audits that most local governments never seriously scrutinize before signing the contract.
If you want to see how far this network already reaches, check our map of known ALPR deployments — Chicago and its collar counties are far from alone. And if this video makes you want to do more than watch, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level, from public records requests to city council testimony.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Chicago Justice Project, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.