Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith: License Plate Readers Are Constitutional

Our Take

Credit to Jen's Two Cents for getting Mohave County Attorney Matt Smith on record defending automatic license plate readers to the Board of Supervisors. His pitch is the one we hear in county after county: every login is logged, every access is auditable, and because your plate is visible to anyone on the street, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy — so no Fourth Amendment problem.

That argument technically works for a single officer glancing at a single plate on a single day. It falls apart the moment you're talking about a networked system that silently photographs every car, every time, and stores the pattern of your movements for weeks or months. Courts have increasingly recognized that aggregated location data is a different animal than a momentary public observation — the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision on cell-site data made that distinction for a reason. An audit log tells you who looked at the data after the fact; it does nothing to stop the database from being built in the first place, or from being queried by other agencies, sold to data brokers, or shared with federal immigration and intelligence networks that Flock's own system is known to connect with.

"Safeguards" language is doing a lot of work here to reassure a board that's clearly gotten pushback from constituents. Logging isn't oversight, and legal under a narrow reading isn't the same as acceptable policy. If Mohave County residents want to know what's actually watching them, check our camera map for ALPR locations near you, and see take-action for how to push your own county board toward real transparency and retention limits instead of just audit trails.