The secret reason police misconduct fades away

Our Take

Mumford Law lays out something we've been saying since day one: a license plate reader isn't just a crime-fighting tool, it's a surveillance tool, and surveillance tools get abused by the people who hold the keys. 228 plate lookups on one woman. Deputies and officers in Ottawa, Sedgwick, and Joplin turning law enforcement databases into personal tracking devices. These aren't hacking stories — the officers didn't need to break in anywhere. The access was already granted. That's the whole problem.

Flock and similar vendors love to tout "audit logs" as the safeguard, but a log only matters if someone is actually looking at it before the harm happens, not months or years later after a victim files a complaint. In practice, these systems run on trust, and trust is not a security model. When the same database that's supposed to find stolen cars can just as easily be used to find out where an ex-girlfriend, a crush, or a stranger from a traffic stop sleeps at night, the technology has already failed at its stated purpose.

This is exactly why we track where these cameras live and push for real guardrails instead of vendor press releases. Check our camera map to see what's watching your own neighborhood, and head to take-action if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment where you live.