Who Is Being Watched? The Geography of ALPR Surveillance

Our Take

This conversation, hosted by the Chicago Justice Project, gets at something we've long suspected but rarely see quantified: ALPR deployment isn't random, and it isn't evenly distributed. Professor Steven Keener's research digs into the actual geography of these cameras and finds patterns that track race and poverty. That's not a side effect of the technology — it's a reflection of how policing priorities and vendor sales pitches intersect with which neighborhoods get treated as suspect by default.

The framing of "surveillance inequality" matters because Flock and its law enforcement partners love to talk about these networks in neutral, technical terms — nodes, hits, data-sharing agreements. But a camera bolted to a pole doesn't appear out of nowhere. Someone decided that street, that intersection, that neighborhood needed to be watched more closely than another one a few miles away. When 3,000-plus agencies are pooling that data through shared systems, the compounding effect on already over-policed communities isn't hypothetical, it's structural.

We'd encourage readers to see for themselves what this looks like on the ground. Check our camera map to find ALPR locations near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked deployment in your own community, our take-action page has concrete steps for raising this at the local level. Research like Keener's gives us the receipts; what happens next is up to the public.