10,000 Searches by a 90-Officer Department: How Much Surveillance Is Too Much?

Our Take

Do the math on that figure from Jon McCray Jones of the ACLU of Wisconsin: 10,000 searches divided across 90 officers works out to over a hundred queries per cop, per year, assuming an even split (it almost certainly isn't). Even generously assuming only a fraction of officers actively use the system, you're still looking at a department treating a mass license-plate database as a daily-use tool rather than something reserved for active investigations. That's the quiet danger of ALPR networks like Flock — once the infrastructure exists, the volume of use tends to balloon far past what anyone imagined when the cameras first went up.

The real problem is that 'search' is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and most departments don't publish audit logs detailed enough for the public to know what those searches were for. Was it a stolen vehicle? A warrant? A curiosity about an ex's new boyfriend? Without consistent audit requirements and public reporting, a number like 10,000 is just a number — it tells us scale, not legality or necessity. That ambiguity is exactly why departments resist transparency: vague use policies are easier to defend than detailed logs.

Credit to the Chicago Justice Project and Jon McCray Jones for putting a concrete figure to what privacy advocates have been warning about for years — that ALPR systems don't stay narrow for long. If you want to see how dense this surveillance net has gotten in your own area, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on unchecked access, our take-action page has tools to start that fight locally.