Speed cameras off in Milford, but 14 license plate readers remain on city’s borders

Our Take

Milford's mayor wants credit for killing the speed cameras, and fine, that's a win if it actually happened. But WFSB's report buries the real story: 14 license plate readers are still sitting on the city's borders, untouched, cataloging every car that comes and goes. Swapping a speed camera for an ALPR isn't a privacy upgrade — it's a trade of one surveillance tool for a more powerful one. Speed cameras clock how fast you drove. ALPRs build a timestamped map of your entire life, who you visit, where you work, what church or clinic you pull into.

This is the pattern we see in town after town: officials make noise about scaling back one unpopular program while a quieter, more invasive network keeps humming along at every exit and entrance to the city. Flock and its competitors have made border cameras so normalized that local news treats 14 of them as a footnote instead of the headline. Residents of Milford, and anyone whose commute crosses those borders, are having their movements logged whether they consented or not.

Check our camera map to see what's actually watching your routes in Connecticut, and if Milford's city council never had a real public debate about these 14 readers, that's worth demanding one. Our take-action page has steps for pushing back before 'border cameras' become permanent infrastructure nobody remembers voting for.