Police use government databases as dating apps?!

Our Take

Mumford Law lays out a pattern that should chill anyone who's been told ALPRs are just for finding stolen cars and wanted felons: an officer running a woman's plate 228 times with zero investigative justification. That's not a glitch in the system. That's the system working exactly as designed for anyone with a badge and an itch to look someone up — no warrant, no supervisor sign-off in the moment, no victim notification. The Ottawa, Sedgwick, and Joplin cases cited in the video aren't outliers; they're the visible tip of a problem that mostly stays invisible because audit logs sit unread until a victim complains or a reporter files a records request.

This is the core argument we keep making: license plate readers and the databases tied to them weren't built with meaningful guardrails against insider abuse. Every camera on a pole is a data point feeding systems that officers can query for personal reasons — romantic obsession, grudges, curiosity about an ex — and get away with it unless someone happens to catch the pattern. Department policies that promise 'audits' routinely fail to prevent the behavior from going on for months or years, which is exactly what happened in these cases. The technology doesn't just enable legitimate policing faster; it makes stalking-by-database faster and easier to do without leaving fingerprints anyone bothers to check.

If you want to see how saturated your own area is with this surveillance infrastructure, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your city or county, our take-action page has concrete steps. Credit to Mumford Law for pulling these cases together in one place — this is the kind of accountability journalism that should be driving policy change, not just viral outrage.