Do License Plate Readers Actually Reduce Crime?

Our Take

Business Reform's video, sponsored by Grand Canyon University, pokes at a question we've been hammering on for years: does the ALPR dragnet actually reduce crime, or does it just generate a lot of billable hours for Flock Safety and its imitators? Credit to the creator for even asking — most local news segments just parrot the company's press release stats without a second thought. But "do they work" is only half the story. The other half is what happens to the millions of scans of innocent drivers that get vacuumed up along the way, stored, shared, and occasionally leaked or misused.

Police departments love to cite anecdotes about a stolen car recovered or a suspect flagged, but anecdotes aren't evidence of a net public safety benefit, and they definitely aren't a cost-benefit analysis of blanketing entire towns with always-on cameras that track every plate that rolls by. Correlation gets sold as causation, and meanwhile the infrastructure keeps expanding into neighborhoods that never voted on it. If a technology's core justification is shaky, that should be the headline, not a footnote.

We'd rather people see this for themselves than take anyone's word for it, ours included. Check our camera map to see how much of this surveillance grid has already gone up near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked expansion in your own city, our take-action page has concrete steps for talking to your council before the next contract renewal.