Police Accused of Using License Plate Readers to Track Women

Our Take

AFRO's reporting taps into the fear that keeps us up at night: a system sold as a tool to catch car thieves and Amber Alert suspects becomes a tool for someone with a badge and a grudge to stalk an ex, a coworker, or a woman who turned them down. Flock Safety and similar ALPR networks log every passing plate, timestamped and geotagged, searchable by anyone with access. That access is the whole ballgame, and police departments across the country have shown they're bad at restricting it and even worse at auditing it after the fact.

This isn't a hypothetical. We've seen case after case where officers misuse law enforcement databases to track romantic partners or people they're fixated on, and ALPR data is arguably more dangerous because it's passive, constant, and doesn't require the target to do anything wrong. Credit to AFRO for putting a human face on what too often gets discussed only in abstract policy terms — the people whose movements get quietly logged and then weaponized against them.

If you want to know whether this kind of surveillance infrastructure is already sitting in your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on it, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting answers from local officials.