Police now using Leonardo ALPR's that track if a phone is inside a car and where it goes

Our Take

Credit to Centerton Arkansas Tyrant Patrol for digging into this — it's exactly the kind of local, on-the-ground reporting that keeps vendors and police departments honest. If ALPR hardware is really being pitched or deployed with phone-detection capability bundled in, that's a meaningful escalation. License plate readers were sold to the public as a narrow tool: read a plate, check it against a hot list. The moment a camera network starts correlating plates with the devices riding inside the car, you've quietly built a system that can link a vehicle to a specific person, not just a piece of metal and paint.

This is the pattern we keep seeing across the ALPR industry — capability creep sold in small, reasonable-sounding increments until the aggregate system looks nothing like what communities were told they were approving. A camera that logs phones in transit isn't solving stolen cars or AMBER alerts any better; it's building a richer surveillance profile that can be queried, shared, or subpoenaed later, often with little public oversight of retention or access policies.

If you want to see what's already watching your streets, check our camera map, and if your city council hasn't had a real public debate about what these systems collect and share, our take-action page has steps to push for transparency before the hardware shows up on your corner.